Emotion understanding (EU) is a socio-cognitive skill that enables us to understand the expression of emotions in ourselves and others. Exposure to early adversity hinders its development, since quality social interactions are essential for its growth. Language is a critical component of EU, and therefore, it may be a mediator between early…

Prediction from early development to later achievement has the potential to improve clinical and educational service delivery as well as to inform developmental theory. In this longitudinal study, we asked how well can educational achievement measured in the final year (Grade 9, age 15) of compulsory education--both overall and for outcomes in the…

Maternal education is associated with early child outcomes. However, the several mechanisms that may explain this relationship remain underexplored. Using data from 1,097 children aged 12-15 months in Chile, we estimate the maternal education gap across child cognitive and language outcomes. Following a bioecological perspective, we explore…

The frequency and length of games, conflicts, and contingency sequences that took place between toddlers as they got to know one another were studied using archival data. The sample consisted of 28 unfamiliar 20- and 30-month-old toddlers (predominantly White, 16 males) who met separately with each of two other toddlers for 18 play dates. The…

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

A revised form of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (SCDI-III) was presented designed for Swedish speaking children aged 2 years 6 months-4 years 0 months with the objective to give a proxy measure of their language competence. The instrument contains a vocabulary checklist with 100 words, mainly predicates, from four areas;…

Emotion comprehension (EC), theory of mind (ToM), and language are particularly important aspects of child development. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in understanding how these three variables are related to preschool children. However, results have been contradictory, and it is not clear how EC, ToM, and language are…

The Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) are assessments tools for measuring the development of children under age three in global contexts. The present study describes the construction and psychometric properties of the motor, cognitive, language, and socio-emotional subscales from the CREDI's long form. Multidimensional item…

Children who enter school with limited proficiency in the language of instruction face a range of challenges in negotiating this new context, yet limited data have been available to describe the early developmental outcomes of this subpopulation in the Australian context. The Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) is a teacher-rated checklist…

We investigated the role of mothers' references to mental states and behaviors and children's emotion situation knowledge (ESK) in a prospective, cross-cultural context. European American mothers (n = 71) and Chinese immigrant mothers (n = 60) and their children participated in the study. Maternal references to mental states and behaviors were…

Relationships exist between language ability, emotion regulation, and social competence in preschool children. This study examines how these relationships function in elementary school children, and explores whether language ability partially mediates the relationship between emotion regulation and social competence. Second-grade students (N = 67)…

We investigated the influence of biological immaturity and attachment security on linguistic development and tested whether maternal language mediated the impact of security on the child's linguistic abilities. Forty mother-child dyads were followed longitudinally, with the child's attachment security assessed at 24 months of age through trained…

Joint attention has been suggested to contribute to children's development of cooperation; however, few empirical studies have directly tested this hypothesis. Children aged 1 and 2 years participated in two joint action activities to assess their cooperation with an adult partner, who stopped participating at a specific moment during the tasks.…

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the…

This investigation was aimed at studying the relations between executive functions (EFs) and categorical emotion understanding while controlling for preschoolers' IQ, language ability and theory of mind (ToM). Specifically, we wanted to analyse the association between emotion understanding and set shifting, due to the lack of studies with this EF.…