When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of…

The learning environment plays a crucial role in the promotion of school science. Redesigning the science classroom into a metacognitive learning environment is imperative in developing students' 21st century skills -- communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative thinking. In this study, we exposed the students to a variety of…

Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is challenging due to its phenotypic and etiological heterogeneity, but critical for implementation of early interventions. We examined the age of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis in a sample of 554 children and adolescents enrolled in the ELENA cohort study in France with regard to the influences of…

Literature has shown the importance of social cognition for emotional wellness. However, to our knowledge, few studies so far investigated the relationship between social cognition and anxiety in childhood. No study systematically examined social cognition in relation to specific domains of anxiety. By a correlational design and multivariate…

At the end of compulsory schooling, young adults decide on educational and occupational trajectories that impact their subsequent employability, health and even life expectancy. To understand the antecedents to these decisions, we follow a new approach that considers genetic contributions, which have largely been ignored before. Using genomewide…

The associations between parenting practices and adolescent anxiety symptoms were examined in both individual and monozygotic (MZ) twin differences levels. Participants were 804 pairs of Chinese MZ adolescent twins aged 10-18 years (M = 13.57, SD = 2.67, 52% females). Twins' anxiety symptoms were assessed by self- and parent-reports. Twins also…

In view of the theory that the attachment relationship provides a foundation for the development of emotion regulation, here, we evaluated (a) whether change in attachment security from 4 to 6 years predicts change in emotion regulation from 6 to 8 years and (b) whether "5-HTTLPR" moderates this relation in a Norwegian community sample…

It is now possible to create individual-specific genetic scores, called genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS). We used a GPS for years of education ("EduYears") to predict reading performance assessed at UK National Curriculum Key Stages 1 (age 7), 2 (age 12) and 3 (age 14) and on reading tests administered at ages 7 and 12 in a UK sample…

Background: Childhood behavior problems predict subsequent educational achievement; however, little research has examined the etiology of these links using a longitudinal twin design. Moreover, it is unknown whether genetic and environmental innovations provide incremental prediction for educational achievement from childhood to adolescence.…

The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A…

Purpose: The authors of this article examined the etiology of developmental language impairment (LI) at 4 and 12 years of age, as well as the relationship between the 2. Method: Phenotypic and quantitative genetic analyses using longitudinal data from the Twins Early Development Study (Oliver & Plomin, 2007) were conducted. A total of 2,923…

Background: Schooling is considered one of the major contributors to the development of intelligence within societies and individuals. Genetic variation might modulate the impact of schooling and explain, at least partially, the presence of individual differences in classrooms. Method: We studied a sample of 1,502 children (mean age = 11.7 years)…

Despite consistent evidence that serotonin functioning affects stress reactivity and vulnerability to aggression, research on serotonin gene-stress interactions (G x E) in the development of aggression remains limited. The present study investigated variation in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) as a moderator of the…

The genetic and environmental origins of individual differences in mathematical self-evaluation over time and its association with later mathematics achievement were investigated in a UK sample of 2138 twin pairs at ages 9 and 12. Self-evaluation indexed how good children think they are at mathematical activities and how much they like those…

Although previous research has identified contemporaneous associations between cognitive deficits and symptom phenotypes in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, no studies have as yet attempted to identify direction of effect. The present study used cross-lagged path modeling to examine competing hypotheses about longitudinal associations…