Background: Sex-differences exist in some areas of human social behaviour. In animals, foetal testosterone (fT) plays a central role in organising the brain and in later social behaviour. fT has also been implicated in language development, eye-contact, and spatial ability in humans. Methods: Fifty-eight children (35 male and 23 female), whose fT…

The authors' objective in this article was to explore the accuracy of mothers' estimates concerning their children's developmental functioning, especially with respect to vocabulary and gross motor development, by comparing the results of diagnostic tests administered to both the children and their mothers. The authors studied 55 children with…

Due to the relatively late age of clinical diagnosis of autism, the early brain pathology of children with autism has remained largely unstudied. The increased use of retrospective measures such as head circumference, along with a surge of MRI studies of toddlers with autism, have opened a whole new area of research and discovery. Recent studies…

This pilot study reports on data drawn from migrant Hispanic families enrolled in a 4-year Migrant Education Even Start project and a comparison group of nonmigrant Hispanic families. The study was designed to examine child- and family-based risk factors known to imperil literacy outcomes. Four notable findings emerged from this study. First,…

This paper reports two studies that investigate differences in comprehension monitoring skills between good and poor comprehenders. Two groups of 9- to 10-year-olds, who were matched for reading vocabulary and word recognition skills but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. In the first study, in which the children were required to…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how brains with and without language compute numbers. Measuring young children's verbal reactions in Spain and Finland, we show that, although there is a general arithmetic ability for small numbers that is shared by monkeys and preverbal infants, the development of such initial knowledge in…

This paper proposes the existence of a cognitive process by which multilinguals who incorporate nontarget lexical items from one non-native language into another may (1) come to identify the lexical item transferred from a source to a guest system as belonging to the guest system and (2) fail to recognise the source of their knowledge in the…

Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant' s first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed…

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.),…

Stable nonnative varieties of English acquired and used in the absence of native English input can diverge systematically from native varieties over time (Cheshire, 1991; Kachru, 1983; Platt, Weber, & Ho, 1984). Focusing on Indian English article use, this study asks the following question: If divergence is indeed occurring, do new features…

Our research is concerned with the observation of communication between the child and his parents (mother-baby vs. father-baby). The children are aged from 30 to 36 months old. Communication was analysed according to utterances functions and social aims. 14 French children, 7 boys and 7 girls were filmed with each of their two parents in their…

This paper looks at the demographic distribution of campus and distance students of an MA TEFL/TESL course offered by a British University. An examination of the mother tongue of all students between 1994 and 2003 shows that non-native speakers on campus have increased from 60% to 90%. At the same time, native speaker campus students have…

As part of a larger Slovene longitudinal study on the impact of the preschool institution on the child's development and his or her school achievements, effects of the age at entry to preschool on children's language were explored. The sample included 82 children, who were divided into two groups depending on their age at entry to the preschool…

This study, part of a narrative classroom inquiry into the teaching and learning of mathematics in a Canadian elementary classroom, emerges from the three years I was a participant-observer in Janine O'Neil's 3rd/4th-grade classroom at Bay Street Community School. Drawing on the curriculum commonplaces of teacher, social milieu, subject matter,…

In this article, the author talks about guided reading which she incorporated to second-language learners. First, she gives a brief description about guided reading and current myths about second-language learners. Then, she presents her goals whether she could integrate second-language learners into guided reading. She discusses what reading…