Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

The transition to early childhood education is important for all stakeholders. This study aimed to examine the expectations of teachers and parents whose children were starting school for the first time regarding themselves and each other during the preparation for and transition to school. Sixteen parents and eight teachers participated in the…

The aim of the present study was to provide a comprehensive model for assessing family context and to explore the reliability and factor structure of the Haezi Etxadi-Family Assessment Scale (HE-FAS 4), an exhaustive measure covering variables related to family context influencing child development, described over the past two decades. A sample of…

Aistear: The Early Childhood Curriculum Framework, was launched in Ireland in 2009. The framework is applicable in all settings where children in the 0-6-year range are present; this includes all early years settings and the first two years of primary schools, referred to as "infant classes" in the Irish context. This article shares the…

Observational studies comparing child outcomes in early care and education classrooms of differing quality are often confounded by between-child differences. A within-child design, tracking children across contexts, can identify the effects of quality with less confounding. An analysis of Australian children (N = 1128, mean age 5 years, 48%…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

The aim of this research was to examine parental practices aimed at supporting children's school readiness in social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic and self-care domains. A case study design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the research. The study group of the research included 25 participants. The participants were…

We suggest that prior to school entry, our earliest "teachers" and "learning settings" --that is, our parents, caregivers, and homes--provide signals about our environmental conditions. In turn, our brains may interpret this information as cues indicating the types of environments we will likely face and adapt accordingly. We…

Background: Poverty-related disparities in school readiness are well documented (Dreyer, 2020). Increasing cognitively stimulating parenting practices can contribute greatly to addressing such disparities, and therefore represent a key modifiable target for preventive interventions beginning early in life (Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005).…

The aim was to evaluate the effects of a family-focused early intervention programme on the cognitive, motor, and language development of infants exposed to social and biological risks in the first year of life. Quasi-experimental randomized controlled trial (RBR-6ct969), with intervention (IG; n = 72) and control (CG; n = 170) groups. IG mothers…

This Special Issue on linguistic and cognitive development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arose from the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) (2017), when Jeannette Schaeffer, Stephanie Durrleman, and Inge-Marie Eigsti organized a symposium on this topic. It shows that the study of language development…

This review addresses the question of how early access to sign language influences the development of deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the literature surrounding the topic across the domains of spoken/written language development, cognitive development, and sociocultural development. Although research in the realm of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of the grunt vocalizations to cognitive and expressive language status in children with disabilities. Children with typical development produce communicative grunts at the onset of referential word production and comprehension at 14-16 months of age and continue to use this…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) show delays in Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Complement sentences such as "Eliane says that Santa Clause exists" influence ToM performance. Can a training program targeting sentential complements enhance ToM? Twenty-one French-speaking DHH children (M[subscript age] = 8 years 11 months)…