Data from a longitudinal investigation were used to examine the effects of mothers' and teachers' language on children's developing mathematical competencies during the kindergarten year. Specifically, 1) mothers' use of metamemory talk, or references to the process of remembering, and 2) teachers' use of "cognitive processing language"…

A simple "expression" account of the relation between executive function (EF) and children's developing theory of mind (ToM) has difficulty accounting for the generality of the changes occurring in children's mental-state understanding during the preschool years. The current study of preschool children (N = 43) showed that EF--especially…

The relations among children's theory of mind (ToM), their understanding of the intentionality of teaching, and their own peer teaching strategies were tested. Seventy-five 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds completed 11 ToM and understanding-of-teaching tasks. Subsequently, 30 of the children were randomly chosen to teach a peer how to play a board game,…

This study investigated the roles of different executive function (EF) components (inhibition, shifting, and working memory) in 2-step arithmetic word problem solving. A sample of 139 children aged 8 years old and regularly attending the 3rd grade of primary school were tested on 6 EF tasks measuring different EF components, a reading task and a…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…