The current study investigated the effect of colour vs. black-and-white pictures on the stories children told using the pictures as stimuli. Participants were 22 preschool children aged 4-6 (M = 59.98, SD = 7.52) attending day-care centres in a Western Canadian city. Two story sets of five pictures each, depicting stories with similar structure,…

Newborn infants appear to possess an innate bias that guides preferential orienting to and tracking of human faces. There is, however, no clear agreement as to the underlying mechanism supporting such a preference. In particular, two competing theories (known as the "structural" and "sensory" hypotheses) conjecture fundamentally different biasing…

Four-hundred-and-eighty children in the age groups of four and six years, 240 each from Brazil and Norway, were asked how their feelings of anger, sadness and fear were reduced in a recollected episode, to propose emotion regulation strategies for protagonists and to envisage the result of regulation strategies. A majority of even the youngest…

This research focuses on young children's experiences of the visual mode embedded in new multimodal literacy practices. An enquiry was undertaken into the role of visual and digital images in a group of 11 four-year-olds' out-of-school lives. The children photographed their use of a range of primarily visual-based media at home, to produce a book…

Baby media have exploded in the past decade, and children younger than 2 are showing increased use of these baby media. This paper examines the historical evidence of babies' use of television since the 1950s as well as the various factors that have given rise to the current increase in screen media for babies. We also consider the ubiquitous role…

Transitions in early childhood classrooms are changes from one activity to another or from one place to another. Well-planned transitions can be positive learning experiences for children. During transitions children can sing songs, follow a leader by copying his or her physical motions, practice counting, or even recite a favorite poem or nursery…

In this study, the effects of eliciting positive and negative emotions on various cognitive functions of four- to five-year-old preschool children were examined. Emotions were elicited through presentations of "happy" and "sad" video clips, before the children performed the cognitive tasks. Behavioural (facial expressions) and…

"S"pontaneous "a"ttention to "n"umber (SAN) is the tendency to notice the relatively abstract attribute of number despite the presence of other attributes. According to nativists, an innate concept of one to three directs young children's attention to these "intuitive numbers" in everyday situations--even before they acquire language. According to…

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded…

According to Piaget, 5- or 6-year-old children gradually acquire the concept of time based on events (Piaget, 1969). In his experiment of investigating children's time concepts, Piaget found that children of these ages were able to place pictures based on sequential events with some errors; the younger children made more errors. The National…

This paper presents findings from a correlational study of the relationship between teachers' vocabulary instruction practices and pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children's vocabulary. We observed sixteen teachers during three 90-minute language arts blocks, and we assessed the performance of their 244 children on knowledge of target words and…

Purpose: This study provides a comprehensive examination of substitutions that occur at Greenlee's 3rd stage of cluster development (M. Greenlee, 1974). At this stage of cluster acquisition, children are able to produce the correct number of consonants but with 1 or more of these consonants being substituted for another. Method: Participants were…

The purpose of this study was to measure the effects of reading racetrack and flashcards when teaching phonics, sight words, and addition facts. The participants for the sight word and phonics portion of this study were two seven-year-old boys in the second grade. Both participants were diagnosed with a learning disability. The third participant…

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching…

Few studies have explored the development of the gesture-speech system after the two-word stage. Aim of the present study is to examine developmental changes in speech and gesture use, in the context of a simple naming task. Fifty-one children (age range: 2;3-7;6) were divided into five age groups and requested to name pictures representing…