This study compared oral health behaviours and barriers to dental care among preschool children with and without ASD, and evaluated dental knowledge and attitudes of their parents. 257 preschoolers with ASD and an age- and gender-matched control sample were recruited. Children with ASD had less frequently performed tooth-brushing and used…

Previous research has suggested that handwriting letters may be an important exerciser to facilitate early letter understanding. Experimental studies to date, however, have not investigated whether this effect is general to any visual-motor experience or specific to handwriting letters. In the present work, we addressed this issue by testing…

Background: Recent studies indicate that parent education programs that include content to enhance parents' mental states may prove efficacious in improving parenting behavior and child outcomes. Objective: This study presents findings from a national evaluation of the "Active Parenting First Five Years" (FFY) program. This group-based…

Background: Shared reading interventions can impact positively on preschool children's language development and on their caregiver's attitudes/behaviours towards reading. However, a number of barriers may discourage families from engaging with these interventions, particularly families from lower socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. We…

Several studies have stressed the outcomes for families who are supported by Early Intervention in the following dimensions: knowledge/information; development of competencies; well-being; and quality of life. As a result, this study assessed 999 families to examine the outcomes of Early Intervention in Portugal. Our results show that families…

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess--for example, that when they are…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the "Visual Awareness Education Programme" developed to support the visual literacy skills of preschool children. The study group comprised 40 children (20 children in the experimental group and 20 children in the control group) attending preschool in the 2014-2015 school…

This article presents a study of preschool-aged children's knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) "any". NPIs like "any" differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like "a": "Any" is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979;…

The current study investigated the role of theory of mind development in school readiness among 120 low-income preschool and kindergarten children. A short-term longitudinal design was used to examine relations among theory of mind, the understanding of teaching, and learning behaviors and their collective role in children's literacy and numeracy…

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with reading. An increased focus on emergent literacy skills--particularly print knowledge--might improve later reading outcomes. We analyzed longitudinal measures of print knowledge (i.e., alphabet knowledge and print-concept knowledge) for 35 preschoolers with ASD relative to a sample of…

It is unclear how children learn labels for multiple overlapping categories such as "Labrador," "dog," and "animal." Xu and Tenenbaum (2007a) suggested that learners infer correct meanings with the help of Bayesian inference. They instantiated these claims in a Bayesian model, which they tested with preschoolers and…

This study serves as an initial inquiry regarding the early print knowledge of emergent bilingual preschool-age children living in an Indigenous community in Mexico. In this research, we examine various dimensions of print knowledge with Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children for whom one of their languages (Yucatec Maya) is seldom seen in print…

The current study aims to explore how children explain the concepts of biology and how biological knowledge develops across ages by focusing on the structure and functions of the digestive system. The study was conducted with 60 children. The data were collected through the interviews conducted within a think-aloud protocol. The interview data…

The purpose of this cross-cultural study was to describe and compare US and Turkish children's observational knowledge of the day and night cycle and to identify similarities predicted by framework theory. Fifty-six (27 US and 29 Turkish) young children (ages 48-60 months) participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews were individually…

Concurrent associations between teacher ratings of inattention, hyperactivity and pre-reading skills were examined in 64 pre-schoolers who had not commenced formal reading instruction and 136 school entrants who were in the first weeks of reading instruction. Both samples of children completed measures of pre-reading skills, namely phonological…