Background: The negative impact of institutionalization on children's development and well-being has led to a global recommendation for deinstitutionalization. In countries with weak infrastructure and family support, some children in institutional care have been found to have better outcomes, which may be due in part to the family-like…

Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide…

Much recent research has shown that children from age 4 onwards reveal a robust preference for reliable over unreliable informants when choosing whom to trust and learn from. Findings concerning selective model choice in children younger than 4 years have mostly been mixed. The present study developed a new touchscreen-based paradigm with reduced…

Learning constitutes a main developmental context for children everywhere. Learning-related emotions can affect cognition, motivation, and achievement and are associated with parenting. Studies on learning-related emotions and how parenting is associated with a child's emotional development in learning have been less conclusive for Chinese…

Self-regulation has been established as a key mechanism associated with a variety of outcomes, including school readiness (Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland, Cameron, Connor, et al., 2007; Morrison, Ponitz, & McClelland, 2010), academic achievement (Cameron Ponitz, McClelland, Matthews, & Morrison, 2009; Duckworth, Tsukayama, & May,…

Counting is an evolutionarily recent cultural invention of the human species. In order for humans to have conceived of counting in the first place, certain representational and logical abilities must have already been in place. The focus of this article is the origins and nature of those fundamental mechanisms that promoted the emergence of the…

The scientific study of reading has taught us much about the beginnings of reading in childhood, with clear evidence that the gateway to reading opens when children are able to decode, or 'sound out' written words. Similarly, there is a large evidence base charting the cognitive processes that characterise skilled word recognition in adults. Less…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

As they develop, children become interested in and use increasingly diverse apps on devices such as smartphones. For more than a decade, pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and computer scientists like us have been studying children's ability to use smartphone apps and the positive and negative effects of doing so. In this article, the…

This study uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine the effect of childhood trauma experiences on college graduation rates. A longitudinal mediation path analysis with a binary logistic regression is performed using trauma as a mediator between race, gender, first-generation status and college completion. The…

Attendance at high-quality early childhood education and care services can have positive impacts on children's learning and development, particularly for disadvantaged children. Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory are among the most disadvantaged in Australia and stand to benefit in the short- and long-term from attending high-quality…

Children's language development is a core task in Swedish preschool and central to how educators organize teaching and everyday activities. The curriculum's definition of language is described as extended, with language as both a prerequisite for learning and a learning effect, i.e. both internal processes and communication. This means that…

Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD) is a rare and little researched developmental disorder characterised by regression in language and social skills after a period of seemingly normal development until at least the age of 2 years. The study contacted all parents of CDD patients in Norway to assess patient symptomatology and parents'…

Children with unilateral or mild bilateral hearing loss are increasingly identified in early childhood. Relatively little is known about how hearing loss affects their developmental trajectory or whether it contributes to parenting stress for these parents. This study aimed to examine child behavior and parenting stress in parents of children with…

According to Montessori, children learn more effectively when they discover knowledge on their own, through spontaneous exploratory learning and experiential approach to knowledge, focusing primarily on trusting the child and respecting his exceptional capabilities and skills. The Montessori educational approach was implemented in a public…