Prior research has demonstrated beneficial outcomes for learning new skills in older adulthood, including increased cognitive and functional abilities, which help prevent age-related declines and foster healthy aging. However, these studies largely have included participants not typically considered at risk for cognitive and functional decline…

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children,…

The present study examined adults' understanding of children's early word learning. Undergraduates, non-parents, parents, and Speech-Language Pathologists (N = 535, 74% female, 56% White) completed a survey with 11 word learning principles from the perspective of a preschooler. Questions tested key principles from early word learning research. For…

Previous and current research identify Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) as a possible cause of the positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and Third Language Acquisition (TLA). Although it has been acknowledged that MLA is strongly affected by literacy and grammar-related activities, only a few studies have focused on the context…

Age is an essential factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), impacting the success of students and instructional methods. The purpose of this study is to examine the age factor in SLA by examining three age categories -- children, adolescents and adults. In doing so, the study considers the Critical Period Hypothesis as a base of linguistic…

School engagement predicts academic achievement and attainment, yet remains under-theorized in the sociological literature. While psychologists describe three distinct yet mutually reinforcing categories of school engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement), sociologists have largely neglected to analyze cognitive engagement.…

The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance of education itself. It is not a distraction from the "real work" of math and English instruction; it is how instruction can succeed. And it is not another reason for political polarization. It brings together a traditionally…

The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning (SL). Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

In recent years, the intersection of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience with regard to deaf individuals has received increasing attention from a variety of academic and educational audiences. Both research and pedagogy have addressed questions about whether deaf children learn in the same ways that hearing children…

This article explores the unique and personal experience of learning within a broader framework of development called skill theory. The framework offers a perspective for recognizing within a diversity of experiences a stable order of increasing complexity in skills that individuals display as they execute or demonstrate changes in their…

Repetition priming refers to the facilitation of stimulus processing due to prior processing of the same or similar stimulus, and is one of the most primitive ways in which experience and practice can affect performance. Previous studies have produced contradictory results regarding the stability of repetition priming across development. Drawing…

The use of tests is a well-established tradition in the study of children's learning. Most of these tests claim to establish a child's general understanding, independent of situations and well-known contexts. I have studied narratives told by a four-year-old boy who failed to pass a false belief test (a test designed to examine whether a child is…

The cognitive control of behavior is critical for success in school. The emergence of self-control in development has been linked to the ability to represent one's own and others' mental states (theory of mind and metacognition). Despite rapid progress in exploring the neural correlates of both mind reading and executive function in recent years,…

Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is useful for the purposes of relational thinking (i.e., as structures that can be dynamically bound to arguments). The authors present a theory of how a psychologically…