Inhibitory control (IC) ability in early childhood is associated with positive socioemotional, academic, and behavioural outcomes later in life. However, inhibitory control in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not well understood. We conducted a large, cross-sectional study comparing IC ability of young children with ASD and…

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of…

Self-regulation forms the rudiments for children's academic achievement and socialization. Although one's executive control and verbal skills are needed in both of the core aspects for academic performance: processing to regulate one's own learning and behavior, young students' cognitive capacity for that is still immature influencing the…

Despite the lasting interest towards the relationship between intelligence and creativity, comparably less attention is paid to its age-related changes. Our paper considers the organization of fluid intelligence and psychometric indicators of creativity and is based on the experimental data obtained for children aged 11 (n = 99) and for young…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

When confronted with an emotion prototype (e.g., loss), individuals may experience not only target emotions (e.g., sadness), but also nontarget emotions (emotions that are atypical or incongruent with an emotion prototype; e.g., gratitude in response to loss). What are the cognitive correlates of nontarget emotions? Drawing from models of emotion…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine whether young learners of varying reading and spelling performance, identified in Grade 2, can be distinguished retrospectively from kindergarten, based on their growth profiles in cognitive (planning, attention, working memory--WM) and linguistic (phonological--PA and naming speed--RAN)…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to make inferences about mental states. Thus far, little research has examined ToM development in middle childhood. Importantly, recent studies have distinguished between making inferences about beliefs (cognitive ToM) and emotions (affective ToM). ToM has also been associated with executive functioning,…

Purpose: Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have weaknesses in executive functioning (EF), specifically in tasks testing interference control and working memory. It is unknown how EF develops in children with DLD, if EF abilities are related to DLD severity and persistence, and if EF weaknesses expand to selective attention.…

Purpose: The aims of the study were to explore responses of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to rich vocabulary instruction and to identify potential factors that contribute to outcomes. Method: Children with DLD participated in a language intervention embedded within a science camp. Using parent and clinician reports,…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Substitute object pretense is one of the earliest-developing forms of pretense, and yet it changes considerably across the preschool years. By 3.5 years of age, children can pretend with substitutes that are highly dissimilar from their intended referents (Elder & Pederson, 1978), but even older children have difficulty understanding such…

Learning to behave in socially competent ways is an essential component of children's development. This study examined the relations between children's social, communicative, and cognitive skills and their behaviours during a cooperative task, as well as how these relationships change at different ages. Early school-age (5-8 years old) and middle…