Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas…

Adults can integrate multiple sensory estimates to reduce their uncertainty in perceptual and motor tasks. In recent studies, children did not show this ability until after 8 years. Here we investigated development of the ability to integrate vision with proprioception to localize the hand. We tested 109 4- to 12-year-olds and adults on a simple…

The assessment of young children's thinking competence in task performances has typically followed the novice-to-expert regimen involving models of strategies that adults use when engaged in cognitive tasks such as problem-solving and decision-making. Socio-constructivists argue for a balanced pedagogical approach between the adult and child that…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

Previous research has demonstrated that visual properties of objects can affect shape-based categorization in a novel-name extension task; however, we still do not know how a relationship between visual properties of objects affects judgments in a novel-name extension task. We examined effects of increased visual similarity among the target and…

Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial…

Lee and Sarnecka (2010) developed a Bayesian model of young children's behavior on the Give-N test of number knowledge. This paper presents two new extensions of the model, and applies the model to new data. In the first extension, the model is used to evaluate competing theories about the conceptual knowledge underlying children's behavior. One,…

Drawing developmental predictions from dual-process theories is more complex than is commonly realized. Overly simplified predictions drawn from such models may lead to premature rejection of the dual process approach as one of many tools for understanding cognitive development. Misleading predictions can be avoided by paying attention to several…

This study demonstrates the merits of evaluating a newly developed battery of executive function tasks, designed for use in early childhood, from the perspective of item response theory (IRT). The battery was included in the 48-month assessment of the Family Life Project, a prospective longitudinal study of 1292 children oversampled from…

How people process and represent magnitude has often been studied using number comparison tasks. From the results of these tasks, a comparison distance effect (CDE) is generated, showing that it is easier to discriminate two numbers that are numerically further apart (e.g., 2 and 8) compared with numerically closer numbers (e.g., 6 and 8).…

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms…

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to investigate the lexical and semantic fast mapping ability of young children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normal language (NL), with a specific emphasis on the influence of phonological factors. Method: The study included 46 children (mean age 58 months), half with SLI and half with NL.…

Background: In recent years, clinicians have been using a psycholinguistic approach to the assessment and remediation of children's developmental speech disorders. This requires the comparison of a child's performance across a range of speech-production tasks. Aims: To describe the profile of performance across different speech-production tasks in…

A model for sequencing tasks in the area of visual perception was developed. This paper reports an attempt to validate the structure of the model. The performance of 50 normal preschool children on a 47 item test was studied. The results obtained support the use of the model as a framework for developing visual perception tasks. (Author)

Surface similarity generally promotes reasoning by analogy and physical similarity has been shown to have a powerful positive effect on very young children's use of a scale model as a source of information about another space. The research reported here investigated 2 1/2-year-old children's performance in an object retrieval task when asked to…