As reading to children plays an important role in language development, primary caregivers are often encouraged to read to their children from a very young age. However, little is known about the age at which such reading should start. The linguistic skills of 104 children were assessed shortly before school entry. Their parents were asked how old…

Executive function (EF) is considered a set of interrelated cognitive processes, including inhibitory control, working memory, and attentional shifting, that are connected to the development of the prefrontal cortex and contribute to children's problem solving skills and self regulatory behavior (Best & Miller, 2010; Garon, Bryson, &…

This report is based upon work supported by the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a key White House initiative and program of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). The Social Innovation Fund combines public and private resources to grow the impact of innovative, community-based solutions that have compelling evidence of improving…

Gaping disparities in educational achievement exist at kindergarten entry. Research indicates that school readiness requires a holistic approach directed by the pivotal question: What will allow babies to become successful learners? By understanding the real-life situations of babies and their families in the context of their communities and…

Cross-classified items pose an interesting challenge to children's induction as these items belong to many different categories, each of which may serve as a basis for a different type of inference. Inductive selectivity is the ability to appropriately make different types of inferences about a single cross-classifiable item based on its different…

Children ask questions and learn from the responses they receive; however, little is known about how children learn from listening to others ask questions. Five experiments examined preschoolers' ("N" = 179) ability to solve simple problems using information gathered from listening to question-and-answer exchanges between 2 parties present in the…

Children's confidence in their own knowledge may influence their willingness to learn novel information from others. Twenty-four-month-old children's ("N" = 160) willingness to learn novel labels for either familiar or novel objects from an adult speaker was tested in 1 of 5 conditions: accurate, inaccurate, knowledgeable, ignorant, or…

Infants imitate others' individual actions, but do they also replicate others' joint activities? To examine whether observing joint action influences infants' initiation of joint action, forty-eight 18-month-old infants observed object demonstrations by 2 models acting together (joint action), 2 models acting individually (individual action), or 1…

The purpose of this study was to conduct an acoustic examination of the obstruent stops produced by Korean-English bilingual children in connection with the question of whether bilinguals establish distinct categories of speech sounds across languages. Stop productions were obtained from ninety children in two age ranges, five and ten years:…

Ever since its popularisation by Piaget around 60 years ago, transitive reasoning (deductively-inferring A greater than C from premises A greater than B and B greater than C) has been of psychological interest both as a mental phenomenon and as a tool in areas of psychological discourse. However, the focus of interest in it has shifted…

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a condition characterized by difficulty in the development of motor coordination and learning new motor skills. It impacts on a child's ability to carry out everyday tasks such as getting dressed, using cutlery, writing or drawing, running, and playing sport. It is not due to any intellectual difficulty…

Ross Thompson, PhD, responds to questions about the capacity of infants and toddlers to experience complex emotions and about how parents and caregivers can support early social and emotional development. He underscores the importance of allowing children to experience a wide range of emotions--including frustration and anger--as vital to their…

Traditional approaches to standardized assessment are underpinned by the assumption that between-assessor variation in delivery can effectively be eliminated. However, fine-grained analyses of the administration of such assessments (e.g. Maynard and Marlaire, 1992) have established that significant subtle interactional variations occur even in…

Development can be altered by several factors which can either facilitate or obstruct development. The aim of the current study was the examination and the detection of differences in the developmental profiles of preschool aged children living in conventional institution facilities (N = 28), in SOS villages (N = 20) and in natural family…

People are confronting the most pressing challenge facing every family, school, and community--raising respectful children in a toxic world. In simpler societies, raising children was a shared task of the whole community, as adults and youth worked in harmony and mutual respect. Today, humans are the only species in creation living out of balance.…