Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

Purpose: This study investigated whether maximum speech performance, more specifically, the ability to rapidly alternate between similar syllables during speech production, is associated with executive control abilities in a nonclinical young adult population. Method: Seventy-eight young adult participants completed two speech tasks, both…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…

Purpose: According to Vygotskian theory, verbal thinking serves to guide our behavior and underpins critical self-regulatory functions. Indeed, numerous studies now link inner speech usage with performance on tests of executive function (EF). However, the selectivity of inner speech contributions to multifactorial executive planning performance…

Research Findings: The study investigated whether preschool code-related home literacy experiences had direct associations with regular and irregular word reading in the first year of primary school as well as exploring whether there were indirect associations between these experiences and later word reading via children's language skills or…

Several theories of aggression agree that aggression may be a part of a decision-making process, influenced by current internal states and environmental influences. With more than one-quarter of preschool-age children living in single-parent households, we sought to understand how these children might differ from their peers regarding specific…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…

Interventions for drug abuse and other maladaptive habitual behaviors may yield temporary success but are often fragile and relapse is common. This implies that current interventions do not erase or substantially modify the representations that support the underlying addictive behavior--that is, they do not cause true unlearning. One example of an…

Human behavior is not constant over the hours of the day, and there are considerable individual differences. Some people raise early and go to bed early and have their peek performance early in the day ("larks") while others tend to go to bed late and get up late and have their best performance later in the day ("owls"). In…