Executive functioning (EF) is found to be a powerful predictor for children's school readiness and long-term school outcomes. However, the current research base indicates that children with autism may have an increased likelihood of experiencing deficits in EF or delayed developmental trajectories. Additionally, although there is ample evidence…

In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship between children's domain-general cognitive constraints underlying phonological and sentence processing development in a big sample of typically developing children. 104 children were tested on non-linguistic processing speed, phonological skills (phonological short term memory, phonological…

The present study examined the mediating role of fluid intelligence between working memory (WM) and academic achievement and tested the invariance of this model across gender in a random sample of university students (N = 560, 228 boys & 332 girls). Heart and Flower task (Diamond, 2013) and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices[superscript TM]…

This study examines the associations between implicit and explicit language aptitude and the effects of the timing of corrective feedback (CF). A total of 112 seventh-grade EFL learners were assigned to three groups: Immediate CF, Delayed CF, and Task Only. The three groups underwent three treatment sessions during which they performed six focused…

This study examined the factor structure of executive control throughout elementary school, as well as associations between executive control abilities in preschool and elementary school. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of executive control development in a community sample of children (N = 294; 53% female, 47% male) oversampled for low…

The worst performance rule (WPR) describes the phenomenon that individuals' slowest responses in a task are often more predictive of their intelligence than their fastest or average responses. To explain this phenomenon, it was previously suggested that occasional lapses of attention during task completion might be associated with particularly…

Collaborative inhibition (reduced recall in collaborative vs. nominal groups) is a robust phenomenon. However, it is possible that not everyone is as susceptible to collaborative inhibition, such as those higher in working memory capacity (WMC). In the current study, we examined the relationship between WMC and collaborative inhibition.…

This study examined the longitudinal associations of various executive function components with subsequent psychiatric problems in Chinese school-age children. Data from 1,639 children (44.36% girls) ages 6-13 years were drawn from the Children School Functions and Brain Development project. Executive function components were assessed by the…

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains;…

This pilot study sought to identify potential markers of improvement from pre-post treatment in response to computerized working memory (WM) training for youth (ages 8-18) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and comorbid intellectual disability (ID) in a single arm, pre-post design. Participants included 26 children with ASD and 18 with comorbid…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Research suggests a role for aspects of the working memory system in reading. While much of the evidence points to a role for working memory capacity and the phonological loop, more recent work indicates a role for the central executive component, although findings remain unclear. There is an identified need for a reliable screening measure for…

We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

Executive functions (EF), either conceptualized as skills involved in regulation of cognition and emotion in service of goal-oriented behavior, or reductively as working memory, flexibility and inhibitory control, are commonly invoked constructs in developmental science. Two main traditions on EFs measurement prevail, one consisting of ratings…