Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

Children show marked improvements in executive functioning (EF) between 4 and 7 years of age. In many societies, this time period coincides with the start of formal school education, in which children are required to follow rules in a structured environment, drawing heavily on EF processes such as inhibitory control. This study aimed to…

Only one previous developmental study of Stroop task performance (Schiller, 1966) has controlled for differences in processing speed that exist both within and between age groups. Therefore, the question of whether the early developmental change in the magnitude of Stroop interference actually persists after controlling for processing speed needs…

Recent efforts have focused on screening methods to identify children at risk for dyslexia as early as preschool/kindergarten. Unfortunately, while low sensitivity leads to under-identification of at-risk children, low "specificity" can lead to over-identification, resulting in inaccurate allocation of limited educational resources. The…

In this longitudinal study, we assessed 88 Hong Kong Chinese typically developing kindergarteners' Chinese character reading accuracy four times with 6-month intervals over 1.5 years with the first testing point in the fall of the second year of kindergarten (K2), during which morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic…

While behavioral and educational data characterize a fourth grade shift in reading development, neuroscience evidence is relatively lacking. We used the N400 component of the event-related potential waveform to investigate the development of single word processing across the upper elementary years, in comparison to adult readers. We presented…

Math relies on mastery and integration of a wide range of simpler numerical processes and concepts. Recent work has identified several numerical competencies that predict variation in math ability. We examined the unique relations between eight basic numerical skills and early arithmetic ability in a large sample (N = 1391) of children across…