The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

During adolescence, increases in pubertal hormones lead to reproductive maturity as well as changes in cognitive development. Yet, little is known about how to best characterize interindividual differences in hormone concentrations. The goal of the current study was to examine the antecedents and consequences of membership in empirically derived…

Object word learning can be based on infant-related factors such as their manual actions and socio-linguistic factors such as parental input. Specific input for spatial features (i.e., size, shape, features of objects) can be related to object word comprehension in early vocabulary development. In a longitudinal study, we investigated whether fine…

Learning to behave in socially competent ways is an essential component of children's development. This study examined the relations between children's social, communicative, and cognitive skills and their behaviours during a cooperative task, as well as how these relationships change at different ages. Early school-age (5-8 years old) and middle…

Children's ability to understand and infer the thoughts and feelings of others influences how they develop a unique view of the world. Examining developmental factors that impact young children's success in both social and cognitive domains has important implications for advancing our current knowledge of social cognition. The purpose of this…

The present study aimed to examine the role of phonological--semantic flexibility (PSF) in learning to read Chinese. PSF refers to a specific flexibility applied to process the dual linguistic dimensions of words (i.e., sound and meaning). A correlational study (Study 1) was conducted to determine the unique contribution of PSF to three aspects of…

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the…

The current study examined whether young children's executive functions and emotionality are related to childcare experiences and whether they work as mediators explaining the associations between childcare experiences and early school outcomes. Findings from a national sample of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)…

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship…

The aims of the present study are to examine whether preschool children's scores on a standardized test of vocabulary mediate or moderate the relation between shyness and reticence and to test whether any influence of vocabulary would be found for both teacher and parent assessments of shyness. Participants were 108 children (50 males), mean age,…

The aim of this study was to establish the nature of the relations between inhibitory control (IC) and false belief understanding (FBU). Twenty-eight children, participating in an experimental condition, were tested on a battery of FBU and IC tasks every four weeks for six phases of testing. A control group of 14 children completed the battery…

The present study investigated the relation between executive functioning and symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in children aged 4-6. A population-based sample (n = 201) was used and laboratory measures of inhibition, working memory and verbal fluency and teacher ratings of…

The present study assessed the relations between basic motor abilities in kindergarten and scholastic, social, and emotional adaptation in the transition to formal schooling. Seventy-one five-year-old kindergarten children were administered a battery of standard assessments of basic motor functions. A year later, children's adjustment to school…

Using Ecological Systems Theory and stage sequential modelling procedures for detecting mediation, this study examined how early developmental contexts impact preschoolers' performances on a measure of sustained attention and impulse control. Data from 1273 European-American and African-American participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care…