Despite contrary research findings, many laypeople still claim that starting second language (L2) instruction early yields linguistic advantages. This assertion is again undermined by a 5-year longitudinal study conducted in Switzerland testing the English language skills of 636 secondary-school students who had all learned Standard German and…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

The stability of callous-unemotional (CU) traits and both individual and contextual factors that influence this stability have been studied in community adolescent samples but not to great extent in adolescents who have been arrested. We estimated the developmental changes in CU traits measured over the course of 36 months (6-month intervals)…

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships…

Increasing age is characterized by greater positive affective states. However, there is mixed evidence on the implementation of emotion regulation strategies across the life span. To clarify the discrepancies in the literature, we examined the modulating influence of contextual factors in understanding emotion regulation strategy use in older and…

This review aims to address the major sources of stress experienced by international students, the role of individual differences, the chronology of their stress levels and wellbeing over time, and gaps in the existing literature. Two electronic databases (PubMed and Psych Info) were searched for English peer-reviewed articles using eight search…

The current study is a quantitative research that aims to throw light on the place of students' views on contextual vocabulary teaching in conformity with Constructivism (CVTC) in the field of foreign language teaching. Hence, the study investigates whether any significant correlation exists between the fourth year university students' attitudes…

The main goal of this paper is to analyze how the age factor behaves as an alleged individual difference (ID) variable in SLA by focusing on the influence that the learning context exerts on the dynamics of age of onset (AO). The results of several long-term classroom studies on age effects will be presented, in which I have empirically analyzed…

Children's agentic and communal goals were examined in hypothetical "conflict," "group entry," "victimization," and "positive" situations (N = 310, 11-13 years). Multilevel modeling was used to separate the variation in goals to the between- and within- (i.e., situation-specific) individual levels. About half of the variation in goals was due to…

Three experiments examined how flexibly two- to four-year-old children use the words "big" and "little" in normative, perceptual, and functional contexts. Results showed that children switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. (MDM)

Sixteen children at each of ages two, three, and four years were observed being approached by and interacting with a friendly stranger during their mothers' presence and absence. While analyses of discrete behaviors yielded results consistent with those of earlier studies, analyses based on a behavioral systems approach identified age and…

Analyzes multiple components of planning, including problem representation, goal selection, a decision to plan, strategy choice, strategy execution, and monitoring. Analyzes three tasks typically used to study planning: the Tower of Hanoi; errand scheduling; and story comprehension. Argues that the components required to perform a planning task…

Three studies explored age changes and individual differences in preschoolers' sustained attention in different contexts. Found that changes occurred earlier for play and television viewing than for reaction time tasks. Results suggest that children have stable tendencies to sustain attention but that attention varies with task demands and…

Surveyed fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-graders in Japan and the United States regarding evaluations of peer group exclusion of atypical peers. Found that with increasing age, children demonstrated sensitivity to context (reason the peer was different) and believed that the excluded child should not change to be accepted. Girls were less willing to…

The Cambridge Sibling Study sought to investigate the structure of sibling relationship changes as children grow up, and the patterns of individual differences in these relationships in middle childhood and adolescence. It followed a group of siblings from 43 families from the preschool period through middle childhood and early adolescence. Four…