Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

As young as 3 years old, children rely on a mutual intentionality framework to confer group membership--that is, agreement between a joiner ("I want to be in your group") and group ("We want you to be in our group"). Here, we tested whether children apply this cognitive framework in the context of identity-based groups,…

Current understanding of how culture relates to the development of children's gender-related peer preferences is limited. To investigate the role of societal acceptance of gender nonconformity, this study compared children from China and Thailand. Unlike China and other cultures where the conceptualization of gender as binary is broadly accepted,…

There is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that adults are intuitively cooperative. When presented with a cooperative dilemma between self-maximizing and benefitting the common good, decisions made quickly are more likely to be cooperative, whereas slow decisions tend to favor self-interest. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of intuitive…

Letter production through handwriting creates visual experiences that may be important for the development of visual letter perception. We sought to better understand the neural responses to different visual percepts created during handwriting at different levels of experience. Three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and…

Stunting has been negatively associated with children's development. We examined the range of height by testing hypotheses: (a) height is positively associated with children's development, with associations moderated by inflammation and (b) home environments characterized by nurturance and early learning opportunities is positively associated with…

A large and growing body of work has documented robust illusions of area perception in adults. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little in-depth investigation into children's area perception, despite the importance of this topic to the study of quantity perception more broadly (and to the many studies that have been devoted to studying…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children's later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, less research addresses why the SES "word gap" exists. Moreover, while research has assessed…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

Previous research has shown differences in monolingual and bilingual communication. We explored whether monolingual and bilingual pre-schoolers (N = 80) differ in their ability to understand others' iconic gestures (gesture perception) and produce intelligible iconic gestures themselves (gesture production) and how these two abilities are related…

The widely and internationally replicated socioeconomic status (SES) gradient of executive function (EF) implies that intervention approaches may do well to extrapolate conditions and practices from contexts that generate better child outcomes (in this case, higher SES circumstances) and translate these to contexts with comparatively poorer…

In adults, testing can enhance subsequent learning by reducing interference from the tested information. Here, we examined this forward effect of testing in children. Younger and older elementary school children and adult controls studied four lists of items in anticipation of a final cumulative recall test. Following presentation of each of the…

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3- and…

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…