Background: Related to the target group of young children with a significant cognitive and motor developmental delay, the aims of this study were to obtain more insight into (the interrelations between) several characteristics of these children's expressive communicative behaviour and to explore associations between child behaviour, partner…

Self-regulation develops rapidly during early childhood and is essential for academic and social adjustment. However, previous research has attempted to define the conceptualization and structure of self-regulation differently, leaving the field with an incomplete picture. The nature of the relations between self-regulation and early child…

Children are exposed to many trace elements throughout their development. Given their ubiquity and potential to have effects on children's neurodevelopment, these exposures are a public health concern. This study sought to identify trace element mixture-associated deficits in learning behavior using operant testing in a prospective cohort. We…

In this study, we aimed to determine the role of parental praise and child affect in the neural processes underlying parent-child interactions, utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning. We characterized the dynamic changes in interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) between parents and children (4-6 years old, n = 40…

Teachers often see repetitive behaviors in toddler and preschool classrooms, such as building and knocking down block towers or dumping out toys. When children do these actions over and over it can be frustrating to teachers and parents, but viewing these actions through the lens of schema theory helps us understand what's really going on in…

Identifying and describing children's play behaviours is an important component of evaluating child development. The Behaviour Mapping Schedule is a direct observational tool which aims to describe and quantify children's play behaviours but is yet to undergo reliability testing. This study aimed to determine the intra- and inter-rater reliability…

The current prospective cohort study investigated whether early perceptual abilities, measured at preschool age, could predict later intellectual abilities at school age in a group of 41 autistic (9 girls, 32 boys) and 57 neurotypical children (29 girls, 28 boys). More than 80% of the autistic children were considered minimally verbal.…

Measurement of early childhood development at the population level has traditionally been neglected in Latin America. In this context, Uruguay stands out for having two population-based protocols: the Nutrition, Child Development and Health Survey (ENDIS), a home survey, and the School Readiness - Child Development Inventory (INDI). This paper…

The aim of this research was to study how children's play behaviour was related to their cognitive skills and vocabulary development in integrated early childhood special education (ECSE) groups. The longitudinal study is part of the LASSO research project, which concerns children's stress regulation, learning and quality of early childhood…

Early elementary students on the autism spectrum are at risk for poor quality student-teacher relationships (STRs), a key contributor to student outcomes. However, these students' own appraisals of their STRs are nearly absent from the literature. This study examined children's perspectives of STRs and agreement with teacher-reported STRs for a…

Viewed through a social justice lens, preschool expulsion is an educational equity issue. This study focused on prior expulsion from preschool and child-care in a longitudinal study of 203 autistic children, ages 4 to 7. By parent report, 16%--one out of six autistic children--had been expelled from a preschool or child-care setting prior to…

Substantial evidence endorses the early assessment of cognitive development to promote children's developmental health and well-being. Especially in the Brazilian context, there is a paucity of standardized screening and assessment tools with normative data to evaluate young children. This study provided initial reliability and validity evidence…

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) conducted a landscape evaluation of early childhood programs in Indiana (IN) between the spring of 2021 and the summer of 2022. The evaluation included assessments of infant, toddler, and preschooler children's developmental status in multiple domains at two time points to measure growth.…

The manner in which mothers engage in emotional discussion, or reminisce, with their young children about past emotional experiences poses important ramifications for child socioemotional and cognitive development. Maltreating mothers may have difficulty engaging in emotionally supportive reminiscing. The current study examined the role of…

Sleep disturbances are likely to be associated with emotional and behavioural problems in typically and atypically developing children. The study was aimed to evaluate sleep disturbances in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their associations with emotional/behavioural problems. The study comprised eighteen 5-year-old boys with…