If it is true that "new discoveries in neuroscience suggest that school readiness interventions might come too late if they start after the child is three years old", then the infant/toddler field must claim the concept of school readiness. The brain's foundation for all later learning is created in the first three years of life. As many…

Aim: General developmental outcome is known to be good in school-aged children who experienced febrile seizures. We examined cognitive and behavioural outcomes in preschool children with febrile seizures, including language and executive functioning outcomes. Method: This work was performed in the Generation R Study, a population-based cohort…

Research using an experimental design is needed to provide firm causal evidence on the impacts of child care subsidy use on child development, and on underlying causal mechanisms since subsidies can affect child development only indirectly via changes they cause in children's early experiences. However, before costly experimental research is…

This paper aims to test the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 (H1): Everything else the same, high quality infant-toddler care will increase children's cognitive scores immediately (i.e. at 24 months of age). However, without subsequent high quality preschool, children with high quality infant-toddler care will not have higher cognitive and…

An important question within developmental psychology concerns the extent to which the maturational gains that children make across multiple diverse domains of functioning can be attributed to global (domain-general) developmental processes. The present study investigated this question by examining the extent to which individual differences in…

Research over the past three decades has shown that early intervention in infants biologically at risk of developmental disorders, irrespective of the presence of a brain lesion, is associated with improved cognitive development in early childhood without affecting motor development. However, at present it is unknown whether early intervention is…

A large-scale ("N" = 552) controlled multivariate prospective 14-year longitudinal study of a developmental cascade embedded in a developmental system showed that information-processing efficiency in infancy (4 months), general mental development in toddlerhood (18 months), behavior difficulties in early childhood (36 months),…

Persistent disparities exist between African American children and their European American counterparts across developmental domains. Early childhood intervention may serve to promote more positive outcomes among African American children. The current study examined whether and how the Early Head Start (EHS) program benefited African American…

The relations between fathers' and mothers' home literacy involvement at 24 months and children's cognitive and social emotional development in preschool were examined using a large sample of African American and Caucasian families ("N" = 5190) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Hierarchical…

Two studies examined how children between ages 4 and 6 use body shape (i.e., the waist-to-hip-ratio [WHR]) for sex categorization. In Study 1 (N = 73), 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, selected bodies with increasingly discrepant WHRs to be "most like a man" and "most like a woman." Similarly, sex category judgments made by 5- and…

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas…

We analyze theoretical differences between conceptualist and minimalist approaches to episodic processing in young children. The "episodic-like" minimalism of Clayton and Dickinson (1998) is a species of the latter. We asked whether an "episodic-like" task (structurally similar to ones used by Clayton and Dickinson) in which participants had to…

This study examines the effectiveness of a proposed English language program based on integrating two forms of children literature, mainly short stories and songs, in developing the needed life skills and language learning strategies of primary school students. Besides, it emphasized the importance of providing EFL fifth year primary students with…

Recent studies reveal early and wide gaps in cognitive and oral language skills--whether gauged in English or Spanish--among Latino children relative to White peers. Yet, other work reports robust child health and social development, even among children of Mexican American immigrants raised in poor households, the so-called "immigrant…

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions such as regret and relief develops relatively late compared to their ability to imagine counterfactual worlds. We tested whether a late development in counterfactual thinking: understanding counterfactuals as possibilities, underpinned children's understanding of regret. Thirty 5- and 6-year-olds…