The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

We investigated the role of children's conflict monitoring skills in revising an intuitive scientific theory. Children aged 5 to 9 (N = 177; 53% girls, data collected in Germany from 2019-2023) completed computer-based tasks on water displacement, a concept prone to misconceptions. Children predicted which of two objects would displace more water…

Children tend to make more last-minute locomotor adjustments than adults when avoiding stationary obstacles. The purpose of this study was to compare avoidance behaviors of middle-aged children (10-12 years old) with young adults during a head-on collision course with an approaching virtual pedestrian. Participants were immersed in a virtual…

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

Background: 'Late talkers' (LTs) are toddlers with late language emergence that cannot be explained by other impairments. It is difficult to predict which of these children continue to present long-term restrictions in language abilities and will later be identified as having a developmental language disorder. Procedural memory weaknesses have…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

The ability to extract patterns from sensory input across time and space is thought to underlie the development and acquisition of language and literacy skills, particularly the subdomains marked by the learning of probabilistic knowledge. Thus, impairments in procedural learning are hypothesized to underlie neurodevelopmental disorders, such as…

Purpose: It is not clear if behavioral indices of listening effort are sensitive to changes in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for young children (7-12 years old) from multilingual backgrounds. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of SNR on listening effort in multilingual school-aged children (native English, nonnative English) as…

Semantic diversity quantifies the similarity in the content of contexts a word has been experienced in. Four experiments investigated its effect on lexical and semantic judgments in 9- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 1, a cross-modal semantic judgment task, participants decided whether a visually presented word matched an audio…

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the listening effort made by young children in real classrooms during a prolonged speech reception task in the presence of background noise. Method: The experiment was proposed to 117 typically developing kindergarten and primary school pupils, aged 5-7 years old. An ecological experimental approach was…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate whether dual language experience affects procedural learning ability in typically developing children and in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: We examined procedural learning in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children (ages 8-12 years) with and without SLI. The…

Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…

While age effects in reaction time (RT) tasks across the lifespan are well established for level of performance, analogous findings have started appearing also for indicators of intra-individual variability (IIV). Children are not only slower, but also display more variability than younger adults in RT. Yet, little is known about potential…