Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

The present study investigated whether kindergarten teachers' causal attributions would predict children's reading-related task motivation and performance, or whether it is rather children's motivation and performance that contribute to teachers' causal attributions. To investigate this, 69 children (five to six years old at baseline) and their…

Motor influences on the mental transformation of body parts have been observed in both children and adults. Previous findings indicated that these influences were more pronounced in children than in adults, suggesting a stronger link between motor processes and imagery in children. The present series of two experiments casts doubt on the general…

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used…

This study investigated whether task instructions affect sound-isolation performance. The effects of phoneme class and phoneme position were also assessed. Two hundred Dutch kindergartners were presented with a free-sound-isolation task and its constrained counterparts: an initial-, a middle-, and a final-sound-isolation task. All tasks contained…

This study explored Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of carnival as it applies to 2 second language (L2) learners in an American kindergarten classroom. Unwilling to engage in two story retelling tasks, the children nevertheless invoked the imaginative, playful, and dialogic world of carnival, creating meaningful, contingent contexts for…

In this study, kindergarten children's scores on nine cognitive tasks were evaluated as potential predictors of poor achievement in first grade. A set of five tasks successfully identified 83% of children who were poor readers in first grade, while just three tasks identified 72% of children who were poor achievers in math in first grade. There…

This study assessed long-term effects of an early education intervention for specific learning disabilities. Children at risk for learning problems were observed in classrooms performing analyzed tasks in five content areas: perceptual-motor, auditory, visual, cognitive, and social-emotional. Small-group instruction was then directed to the 37…