Early emerging executive functioning is associated with important emotional, social, and academic outcomes, including academic competence in elementary school. Employing a family study design, the current study investigated preschoolers' executive functioning and receptive vocabulary knowledge, maternal depression and anxiety measured when the…

Aggression in early childhood has been found to predict negative outcomes later in life, including delinquency and psychopathology. The present study explored associations between young children's language, self-regulation, and physical aggression. A community sample of 126 preschool children aged 3 to 6 years (M = 4.87 years, SD = 0.87; 59% boys)…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between executive functioning and word learning among preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Forty-one preschool-age children with DLD were matched to typically developing children on age and sex. Participants were exposed to 10 novel…

Previous research has shown that children aged 4-5 years, but not 2-3 years, show adult-like interference from a partner when performing a joint task (Milward, Kita, & Apperly, 2014). This raises questions about the cognitive skills involved in the development of such "corepresentation (CR)" of a partner (Sebanz, Knoblich, &…

Early number sense knowledge is highly predictive of later math achievement (Herbers et al., in press; Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, & Locuniak, 2009; Obradovic i et al., 2009). However, research suggests that variables beyond number competencies contribute to students' mathematics achievement, most notably, executive function (Blair & Razza,…

This study had two aims. The first aim was to measure mental state understanding in institution-reared children by using a theory of mind (ToM) scale, and to examine the role of cultural context in sequencing of ToM acquisition. The other aim was to investigate ToM in relation to social competence and executive function (EF). Due to its pronounced…

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3-4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97),…

Longitudinal data were obtained from 157 children aged 3 years 3 months to 5 years 6 months at Time 1. At Time 2 these children had aged an average of 12 months. Theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) were measured at both time points. Results suggest that Time 1 ToM scores predict Time 2 EF scores. Detailed examination of sibling…

This study investigated some of the underlying factors that may relate to and predict the reading comprehension of children in fourth through eighth grade (N = 47). A subset of these children previously had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 10); the remainder are classified as typically-developing (n = 37). The participants…