Across the early childhood period of development, young children exhibit considerable growth in their executive functioning (EF) and vocabulary abilities. Understanding the developmental trajectory of these seemingly interrelated processes is important as both early vocabulary and EF have been shown to predict critical academic and socio-emotional…

An overarching framework in the field of developmental psychology highlights the close linkage of cognition with emotion; however, the extent to which this framework supports the relationship between executive functions and emotion understanding in young children remains unclear. Hence, we employ a longitudinal tracking study to investigate the…

Despite support for the importance of early language environments, little is known about the naturally occurring experiences children have in preschool settings. The current study sample included 91 children (M[subscript age] = 4.72 years; 56% male; 67% White) from 23 preschool classrooms and nearly 1500 h of language environment data from three…

Research Findings: This study examined age-based developmental trajectories of four key number sense (NS) skills within an accelerated longitudinal design. Using data from 408 preschoolers, ages 45 to 68 months, linear and latent basis growth curves were evaluated. Results indicated growth across NS skills was best represented as nonlinear for all…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance…

This study aims to identify early childhood sociability trajectories and examine their longitudinal associations with behavior problems. Using a population-based data set presented by the Panel Study on Korean Children, sociability trajectories from age 2 to age 4 were identified by latent class growth analysis. Associations between sociability…

Previous research about children's digital play has predominantly focused on parental perspectives and parental mediation strategies. Although research on the effects of digital play on young children's development is plentiful, there is little evidence on young children's digital play addiction tendency. Herein, preschool children's digital play…

The emergence of prosocial tendencies in early childhood is still not well understood and not commonly tested with direct measures. This study investigated predictors of prosocial behavior (i.e., prosocial decision-making and prosocial creativity) in 3-to-5-year-old children and explored the role of demographic factors on empathy and moral…

The early childhood years are critical for developing executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Prior literature suggests a robust relationship between EF and ToM; however, this relationship has seldom been investigated in children living in poverty. In addition, few studies have employed comprehensive ToM measures to explore how EF…

Age-related developments in sleep during the preschool years are normative and consequential. Yet, very few studies have examined the antecedents of individual differences in such developments, and most have used parental reports of child sleep. This study aimed to investigate the roles of mutual responsiveness in mother-child interactions and…

The aim of the research was to determine what relations occur between the stress experienced by parents in the relationship with their children and the personality traits that they shape in them. Personal characteristics that parents shape in their children have been classified into metatraits described in the Circumplex of Personality model. The…

Metacognition--knowledge, monitoring, and regulation of cognition--is key to learning and academic achievement. This is robustly supported for K-12 and higher education learners while empirical evidence in early childhood is encouraging but limited. To address these gaps in the literature, our first goal was to investigate early metacognition…

Whereas accuracy is used as an indicator of cognitive flexibility in preschool-age children, reaction time (RT), or a combination of accuracy and RT, provide better indices of performance as children transition to school. Theoretical models and cross-sectional studies suggest that a speed-accuracy tradeoff may be operating across this transition,…

Adults' behaviour in interactions with children is assumed to influence children's playfulness. However, little is known about how the quality of teacher-child interaction in early childhood education and care affects the development of children's playfulness, although the interaction quality has been identified as a strong predictor of children's…