The role of environmental education as a vehicle for sustainability in Early Childhood Education is an under researched area in the global south, when compared with the global north. In spite of the fragmented approaches that have been used globally, and recent initiatives by UNESCO through its advocacy, there is very little evidence of action in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a two-phase intervention programme meant to reinforce comprehension of the structural framework of stories among 92 preschool children (aged 4-6 years) over 4 months. During the first phase, the children were called upon to produce their own original stories following the "Story…

Background: Oral comprehension difficulties are prevalent in preschool children with language difficulties and are frequently the target of speech and language therapy (SLT) intervention. To support the implementation of research to practice, there is a need to identify effective interventions for this population and to describe their components.…

Teaching music often focuses on developing musical concepts, through comparisons and discriminations. This paper contributes to the discussion on concept development in music through recognition of common elements in a situation and a shift from a local to a general level, considering theoretical approaches to mathematical generalisation. It sets…

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a…

We examine the long-standing claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding. Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, United Kingdom, examined the use of a scale model comparing performances on a "copy" task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement…

Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

Although substantial research has established how to teach word reading, the research base for teaching skills related to language and reading comprehension is more limited. We report a multistate experiment of a supplemental, whole-class, language-focused curriculum delivered in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms that was designed to…

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current…

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the…

Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared…

Children could internalise blame for a death, suffer as much grief as adults, and express as much emotion as adults. Research on young children's perceptions of death has been conducted primarily in Western cultures. This paper is an exploration of Chinese 5-year-olds' understanding of death. Data analyses are mainly based on children's drawings…

This study examines the impact of manipulation on the performance of 3.5- and 4-year-old children in the Give-N task with concrete representations (sets of bottle caps and pictures of dots) and spoken number words. In this task, children were asked to give a certain number of items (cookies) using the three representational formats. Children were…

The English dative alternation has received much attention in the literature on argument structure acquisition in children. However, the data on the acquisition of this alternation have consistently revealed a counter-intuitive pattern: children look more proficient with the lower frequency prepositional form of the dative than with the higher…

Researchers examined the effects of previewing on preschoolers' comprehension of narrative and educational content in a television program. Children (3-5 years, N = 107) watched an educational math episode in one of three conditions: no-preview control, education-focused expository preview, or story-focused narrative preview. A main effect of…