Children are known to derive more implicatures when the required alternative is made salient through contrast or when it is made contextually relevant through a story or a Question Under Discussion. We investigated the exclusivity implicature of three disjunctions (sau “or”, sau… sau, and fie…fie “either…or”) in child Romanian, an understudied language in the previous literature. Three experiments

This study examined whether a mediational cascade involving children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity to a series of cognitive and socio-evaluative stressors, their callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and psychological adjustment was moderated by their cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity. Using a multi-method, multi-informant design, 238 mothers and their preschool children (Mage = 4

Despite well-documented behavioral changes, the development of neuropsychological substrates underlying inhibitory control remains unknown, hindering understanding of this construct over time. Stability and change in N2, a neural correlate of inhibitory control, and its crosslagged, bidirectional associations with maternal emotion characteristics were examined in 121 preschoolers (59% female, predominantly

The Elementary School Journal, Ahead of Print.

To see whether communicative-based multimodal skills (compared to non-communicative motor skills) predicted complex language skills, this study examined the predictive power of multimodal and motor skills on narrative and expressive pragmatic abilities across two groups. Participants were children with typical development (N = 88, Mage = 5.34, 48% female) and with neurodevelopmental disorders (N = 51

Children of migrant and seasonal farm workers (MSFWs) represent a highly disadvantaged and understudied population in the U.S., with unique educational and socio-linguistic needs. This study leverages nationally representative data on children of MSFWs attending Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) programs to investigate how Spanish-English dual language learners’ (DLLs’) school readiness skills

The Elementary School Journal, Ahead of Print.

This study describes a novel measure of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development—called the Comprehensive Assessment of ToM (CAT)—that addresses limitations in existing ToM measures. This behavioral measure includes three–six items each about diverse desires, diverse beliefs, knowledge access, knowledge expertise, false belief, and visual perspective taking, as well as nonsocial representational

Child self‐regulation has been considered a valuable skill that shapes a child's future life trajectory. Parents have crucial roles in its development, making parenting interventions a strategic means to promote child self‐regulation. Nonetheless, there are no available measures of child self‐regulation suitable for assessing outcomes in evaluations of parenting interventions, particularly in non‐WEIRD

The present study examines whether presenting words in song versus spoken sentences can lead to differences in word learning in 47–50-month-old children. This work extends previous findings on this topic and evaluates whether the location of pitch changes within the song may contribute to how well the words are learned. Using a Preferential Looking Paradigm, 32 children were taught the names of objects

The current study characterized voice onset time (VOT) and vowel onset fundamental frequency (F0) in the production of three Vietnamese alveolar stops (i.e. /t̪ʰ/, /t/, and /d/) by monolingual Vietnamese children and adults. Eighty Vietnamese children aged 3–7 years and 16 adults aged 22–44 years participated in this study. Unlike speakers of other languages with a three-way voicing contrast, Vietnamese

Parenting programs around the world target components of the “Nurturing Care Framework” (NCF)—including responsive caregiving and early learning—to improve early childhood development (ECD). However, it is difficult to optimally design culturally relevant programs without knowing how these components align with local cultural beliefs. This study explored how caregivers understand and encourage early

New family structures are emerging with the inception of artificial reproductive technology (ART), and one of these new formations is donor‐conceived families. These families challenge the traditional definition of family but also face challenges in disclosing origins to their children. Developmental psychology has scarce evidence about how these conversations unfold and how families feel about these

Executive function (EF) measures used with African children heavily depend on task‐based assessments normed in minority world settings. This reliance poses a challenge as it limits the understanding of how children display their EF behaviours within their own culture. Environmental factors including income and parenting are associated with children's EF development. In addition, culture‐specific practices

The Elementary School Journal, Ahead of Print.

It is widely postulated that caregivers’ emotion socialization strategies support children’s positive socio-emotional functioning with peers. However, this theoretical model has been rarely examined empirically in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC), despite ECEC being a prominent environment for children to practice peer play (a robust marker variable for social and emotional

Recent evidence from cross-situational learning (CSL) studies have shown that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously when sentences of the novel language co-occur with dynamic scenes to which they refer. Syntactic bootstrapping accounts suggest that grammatical knowledge may help scaffold vocabulary acquisition by constraining possible meanings, thus, for children, words and grammar

This scoping review aimed to identify and evaluate apps designed to screen or monitor speech, language, and communication (SLC) development in young children. Early identification and intervention are crucial for children with SLC difficulties, but traditional assessments can be time‐consuming and lack ecological validity. Technological advancements offer potential for more objective and user‐friendly

Self‐regulation is the ability to control cognitive, behavioural and social–emotional processes in service of one's goals. In the preschool years, self‐regulation develops rapidly, and during this period, it is influenced by the plasticity of the underlying neurofunctional circuits. Since good early self‐regulation skills favour positive developmental trajectories, numerous interventions have been

This study examines parents’ perceptions and roles in supporting kindergarten children’s English language development through online learning platforms, highlighting the implications for future educational strategies. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the research surveyed 517 parents via questionnaires and conducted six focus group discussions with 60 participants. Quantitative data revealed parents’

Educational acceleration is well established as a best practice for meeting the learning needs of precocious youth. It occupies one region of a broader spectrum of interventions designed to align educational curricula with students’ learning readiness, namely, appropriate developmental placement . Despite over 100 years of robust longitudinal support, educational acceleration is not reliably implemented

Despite substantial improvements to memory precision in childhood, the neural mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. Here, 40 children (7–9 years; 22 females, 18 males; majority White) and 42 adults (24–35 years; 22 females, 20 males; majority White) modulated their approaches to memory formation—focusing on the specific details to encourage precision or general category to encourage imprecision

Acquiring robust semantic representations of numbers is crucial for math achievement. However, the learning stage where magnitude becomes automatically elicited by number symbols (i.e., digits from 1 to 9) remains unknown due to the difficulty to measure automatic semantic processing. We used a frequency‐tagging EEG paradigm targeting automatic magnitude processing in children (N = 33, 5–10‐year‐old

The Elementary School Journal, Ahead of Print.

When determining what others know, we intuitively consider not only whether they succeed but also their probability of success in the absence of knowledge (e.g., random guessing). Across three experiments (n = 240 North American 4–6‐year‐olds, data collected between 2020–2023) we find that 4‐year‐olds understand that tasks with a lower probability of chance success are harder. However, it is not until

Peer relationships are imperative for healthy social and emotional development. In preschool, children are exposed to a new, structured environment, in which there is a sharp learning curve to adjust to unfamiliar expectations. Children with inattention (IA) and hyperactivity/impulsivity (H/I) may have limited social awareness and exhibit disruptive behaviors that lead to peer rejection. Beyond IA

Findings from previous work show that caregivers' math anxiety moderates the positive association between caregiver–child math activities and child math outcomes. Most of this research, however, has focused on elementary school children, primarily White populations, and used mainstream measures. The present study examined the associations between caregiver‐child math activities, caregiver math anxiety

For many children, their home is where they first encounter digital media technologies. The aim of this study is to investigate how children 0 – 3 years old engage in digital media. We address digital literacies as a sociocultural mindset and a toolbox with attention to skills and comprehensions as well as how children express their agency. The overall research question is: What skills, comprehension

Starting in 2021/2022, Canada implemented a new early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy, the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC). CWELCC aims to reduce the cost of child care to an average of $10CA/day. However, prior implementation of similar policies resulted in differential outcomes in terms of benefits received. The current mixed methods study examined 1341 parents’ knowledge

The opportunity for language‐building interactions, and specifically conversational turn‐taking with a caregiver, is a critical foundation for enhancing a child's language development. In this secondary analysis of conversational turns, 89 parent–child dyads who previously completed 1 year of either weekly Music Together (music) or play date (control) classes (intensive intervention phase) were assessed

While a role of language in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) is well established, the interplay with a child’s ability to understand structured scenarios remains unclear. A new scale (Pictorial Theory of Mind Scale), assessing true and false belief comprehension at different levels of linguistic complexity, was used to explore language effects on ToM while accounting for scenario comprehension

This pre-registered randomized clinical trial examined the efficacy of a prevention program on parenting of siblings and sibling relationships among Latinxs. Participants were 272 sibling dyads (82.9% Mexican) with 5th graders (Mage = 10.63; SD = 0.38; 51.8% female), their younger siblings in 1st to 4th grades (Mage = 8.18; SD = 1.06; 54.8% female), and their caregivers. Families were randomized to

Many children in the United States are growing up in homes with a non-English primary spoken language. Because students must learn and perform in English-language classrooms, understanding early factors and processes involved in developing English vocabulary is critical. With a longitudinal panel model, we examined the prediction of fifth-grade English vocabulary skills from both extrinsic (i.e., mothers’

For decades, gifted education programs have identified students from upper-income families at notably higher rates than students from lower-income families. Most studies addressing socioeconomic inequalities in gifted education have focused on systemic and structural barriers to educational resources, such as poverty, peripheral areas, and language barriers. However, because most studies have relied

Research in the field of gifted and talented has significantly shifted in recent years to focus on broader conceptualizations of the construct, including performing arts, creativity, and leadership. Yet, it is not clear how states conceptualize and identify students as gifted and talented given the last review of state gifted and talented regulations (i.e., laws) was conducted more than a decade ago

As women are underrepresented in STEM and the home learning environment has been associated with children's science knowledge, this study focuses on the home science environment as an area where gender differences may occur. To identify potential antecedents of gender differences, this study examined whether there were mean differences in the frequency of parent engagement in science content, processes

Children's fuzziness leads to increased variance in the data, data loss, and high dropout rates in developmental studies. This study investigated the importance of 20 factors on the person (child, caregiver, experimenter) and situation (task, method, time, and date) level for the data quality as indicated via the number of valid trials in 11 studies with N = 727 infants and children (aged 5 months

We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19–58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children’s morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child

There is an increased movement toward locating early childhood programs within school environments. However, there remains some tension between long-held perceptions of play and the realities of play-based pedagogies, resulting in increasing pressure for evidence of outcomes in academic skills, such as numeracy and literacy. This study seeks to provide pedagogical examples of how numeracy and literacy