Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

People with Down syndrome (DS) commonly experience challenges with sleep, executive functioning, everyday memory, and symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A path analysis was conducted to determine if executive function mediated the relationship between sleep problems and both everyday memory and ADHD symptoms. Parents of…

We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation…

Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

Several abilities outside literacy proper are associated with reading and spelling, both phenotypically and genetically, though our knowledge of multivariate genomic covariance structures is incomplete. Here, we introduce structural models describing genetic and residual influences between traits to study multivariate links across measures of…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the eyewitness memory performance of 3- and 5-year-old African American children (N = 33) from lowincome households. The children were asked to remember the routine details of a physical examination immediately after the physical exam and again after a delay interval of 6 weeks. Age-related…

The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age…

The construct autobiographical memory (AM) refers to the mnemonic skill that enables individuals to form personal memories about their lives and re-experience them. Its ontogeny can be understood from the dialectic construction of maturational processes and the cultural-historical context. This research sought to further the knowledge regarding…

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model…

Memory for numbers improves with age. One source of this improvement may be learning linear spatial-numeric associations, but previous evidence for this hypothesis likely confounded memory span with quality of numerical magnitude representations and failed to distinguish spatial-numeric mappings from other numeric abilities, such as counting or…

Prior research has demonstrated that linguistic skills and knowledge contribute to successful reading acquisition. In contrast, little is known about the influence of domain-general learning abilities on reading. To investigate associations between general memory functions and reading during the early stages of learning to read, performance…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children's prospective memory (PM). Metacognitive monitoring was assessed by asking the children to judge their performance before (prediction) and after (postdiction) performing a resource-demanding…

The ability to project oneself forward in time and imagine a future episode, known as episodic foresight (EpF), is an important aspect of future thinking. EpF tasks often involve children choosing an item for a future episode, yet the degree to which future projection is required to succeed -- versus memory or semantic associations -- has been…