Background: Despite studies of how parent-child interactions relate to early child language development, few have examined the continued contribution of parenting to more complex language skills through the preschool years. The current study explored how positive and negative parenting behaviours relate to growth in complex syntax learning from…

Children learn so many things (rules, science, mathematics, etc.) by the help of the games. Chess is also an enjoyable game for most children. The chess grandmaster Karpov stated that chess is everything--art, science, and sport. However, this raises the questions concerning how children evaluate chess and whether chess reflects the child's inner…

The authors ask if participating in an early-childhood theater production improves pretend play and cooperation among preschoolers. They examined play sessions immediately before and after productions of interactive earlychildhood performances at Imagination Stage, Inc. and measured children's engagement, cooperation, pretense, and misbehavior.…

Observation is one of the basic methods in science. It is not only an epistemological method itself, but also an important competence for other methods like experimenting or comparing. However, there is little knowledge about the relation with affective factors of this inquiry method. In our study, we would like to find out about the relations of…

These studies tested two questions about the developmental origins of children's sensitivity to iconicity with regard to number gestures: (1) whether children initially learn number gestures with sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence between fingers and quantities or whether they learn them as unanalyzed symbols; and (2) whether sensitivity…

This work explores whether the facilitative effect of causal information on preschoolers' word and descriptive fact learning persists in school-age children. Twenty-three 5-year-olds just beginning school and 23 6- to 7-year-olds who had accumulated over a year of schooling were taught novel words along with descriptions of causally rich,…

Preschool children's use of decontextualized language, or talk about abstract topics beyond the here-and-now, is predictive of their kindergarten readiness and is associated with the frequency of parents' own use of decontextualized language. Does a brief, parent-focused intervention conveying the importance of decontextualized language cause…

Research Findings: This study examines the association between preschool classroom activity and the quality of the language spoken by teachers and children. Eighteen classrooms serving low-income children between the ages of 3 and 4 in Santiago de Chile were audio-recorded during one morning shift. Recordings were transcribed and segmented into…

Research with preschool children has shown that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N = 67) to…

The authors explored predictions from basic emotion theory (BET) that facial emotion expression recognition skills are insular with respect to their own development, and yet foundational to the development of emotional perspective-taking skills. Participants included 417 preschool children for whom estimates of these 2 emotion understanding…

Research Findings: This study explored the quality of teacher-child interactions within the context of a newly developed standardized task, Teacher-Child Structured Play Task (TC-SPT). A sample of 146 teachers and 345 children participated. Children who displayed the highest disruptive behaviors within each classroom were selected to participate.…

Regular engagement outside may promote healthy physical and psychological development as well as a respect and appreciation for nature. This exploratory study compared biophilia and attitudes toward nature between young children living in an urban area to those in a rural area. Urban and rural areas may offer different opportunities for exposure…

This study investigated whether European American and Japanese mothers' speech to preschoolers contained exchange- and alignment-oriented structures that reflect and possibly support culture-specific models of self-other relatedness. In each country 12 mothers were observed in free play with their 3-year-olds. Maternal speech was coded for…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Evidence is accumulating that early intervention can be effective in improving the skills of young children with autism spectrum disorder. However, the science is hampered by the lack of agreed "gold standard" tools for the measurement of progress and outcome. What is required is a reliable, valid, and sensitive measure of change in the…