The interaction between a mother and child stands as one of the most profound and intricate human connections, weaving a rich tapestry of behavioral and emotional bonds during the formative years. Although mother-child interactions have received substantial attention in the developmental science literature, few studies have tapped into the…

Eye movements provide a sensitive window into cognitive processing during reading. In the present study, we investigated beginning readers' longitudinal changes in temporal and spatial measures of eye movements during oral versus silent reading, the extent to which variation in eye movements is attributable to individual differences and text…

Differentiation hypotheses concern changes in the structural organization of cognitive abilities that depend on the level of general intelligence (ability differentiation) or age (developmental differentiation). Part 1 of this article presents a review of the literature on ability and developmental differentiation effects in children, revealing…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

The purpose of the present research is to explore the development of self-control ability during childhood. A group of 360 children (185 boys and 175 girls from grades 2, 4, and 6) participated in the survey. They completed the Children's Perceived Self-Control Scale (CPSC) which included the interpersonal self-control (ISC), the personal…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused myriad issues for early elementary students and their families. Those early in their educational careers, particularly pre-K-2 students, are especially vulnerable developmentally to abrupt disruptions. School counselors, in turn, are being called upon to respond to crises and provide trauma-informed care for these…

Learning of the mathematical number line has been hypothesized to be dependent on an inherent sense of approximate quantity. Children's number line placements are predicted to conform to the underlying properties of this system; specifically, placements are exaggerated for small numerals and compressed for larger ones. Alternative hypotheses…

The present study focuses on the comprehension and production of non-literal comparisons (NLC) via visual means in three age groups: kindergarten, second grade and fifth grade students. Although non-literality is a cognitive process, the educational system does not take advantage of it in pedagogy, especially before the fourth grade. The research…

We present the results of a longitudinal study of the formation of graphomotor skills in elementary school children between the ages of seven and nine (students in the first and second grades). Patterns in how the skills under investigation develop in normal children and those with learning disabilities were revealed using a computerized survey of…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

The present study used a variant of masked priming to track the development of 2 marker effects of orthographic and phonological processing from Grade 1 through Grade 5 in a cross-sectional study. Pseudohomophone (PsH) priming served as a marker for phonological processing, whereas transposed-letter (TL) priming was a marker for coarse-grained…

The development of two-digit number processing in children, and in particular the influence of place-value understanding, has recently received increasing research interest. However, place-value influences leading to decomposed processing have not yet been investigated for multi-digit numbers beyond the two-digit number range in children.…

Modern behavior-genetic studies of twins in the United States, Australia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom show that genes account for most of the variance in children's reading ability by the end of the 1st year of formal reading instruction. Strong genetic influence continues across the grades, though the relevant genes vary for reading words…

From a developmental framework, relations among list reading fluency, oral and silent reading fluency, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension might be expected to change as children's reading skills develop. We examined developmental relations among these constructs in a latent-variable longitudinal study of first and second graders.…

Researchers, the authors state, link play to cognitive and affective processes important for a child's development and overall well-being. In this article, the authors examine the relationships involving pretend play, coping, and subjective well-being (the last of which they conceptualize as positive affect--positive mood--and life satisfaction)…