Background: Being aware of the different social expectations linked to the principal lifespan stages (i.e., childhood, adulthood, old age) is critical to an individual's inclusion in the community and to developing appropriate social behaviours. However, little research exists on this topic in the field of intellectual and developmental…

Purpose: We evaluated whether naive listeners' ratings of the gender typicality of the speech of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and children assigned female at birth (AFAB) were different at two time points: one at which children were 2.5-3.5 years old and one when they were 4.5-5.5 years old. We also examined whether measures of speech,…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

Given the importance of writing for academic achievement, this study aimed to understand how early oral language contributes to later writing skills. The first objective was to determine if preschool language skills were associated with high school writing, and if so, whether they contributed directly or indirectly through school age language. The…

The origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children's developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in…

This longitudinal study investigated to what extent the acquisition of cognates among bilingual children depends on the degree of cross-language similarity and intensity of exposure to the tested language, and whether children's sensitivity to cognates with different degrees of cross-language similarity changes over time. For three consecutive…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

The rate at which people process information appears to influence many aspects of cognition across the lifespan. However, many commonly accepted measures of "processing speed" may require goal maintenance, manipulation of information in working memory, and decision-making, blurring the distinction between processing speed and executive…

Purpose: The relationship between phonological awareness, overall language, vocabulary, and nonlinguistic cognitive skills to decoding and reading comprehension was examined for students at 3 stages of literacy development (i.e., early elementary school, middle school, and high school). Students with histories of speech sound disorders (SSD) with…

Using a reliable and broad-based measure of morphological awareness, which tapped knowledge of relational, syntactic, and distributional morphology, we examined the development of morphological knowledge among older elementary students and the relationship of their morphological knowledge to a range of literacy measures. We found that…

Recent advances in methods and computer software for longitudinal data analysis have pushed researchers to more critically examine developmental theories. In turn, researchers have also begun to push longitudinal methods by asking more complex developmental questions. One such question involves the relationships between two developmental…

The first goal of this study was to examine young children's developing narrative comprehension abilities using theory-based, authentic measures of comprehension processes. The second goal was to examine the relations among young children's comprehension abilities and other early reading skills. Children ages 4 and 6 listened to or watched two…

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…

This study extends previous research on the social psychological implications of pubertal timing to education by applying a life course framework to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study. Early pubertal timing, which has previously been associated with major…