This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are viewed positively by their peers, but the empirical findings are mixed. This meta-analysis of 20 studies including 2,096 children (aged from 2 years, 8 months to 10 years) revealed a significant overall association (r = 0.19) indicating that children with higher ToM…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Theory of mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3- to 12-year-olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated with health and well-being, such as singing and dancing. One hundred and…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

Mothers' mental-state references predict individual differences in preschoolers' false-belief (FB) understanding; less is known about the origins of corresponding variation in school-age children. To address this gap, 105 children completed observations with their mothers at child ages 2 and 6, three FB tasks and a verbal comprehension…

Using data from children in South Korea (N = 145, M[subscript age] = 6.08), it was determined how low-level language and cognitive skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and working memory) and high-level cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and theory of mind [ToM]) are related to listening comprehension and whether listening…

The development of scientific thinking was assessed in 1,581 second, third, and fourth graders (8-, 9-, 10-year-olds) based on a conceptual model that posits developmental progression from naïve to more advanced conceptions. Using a 66-item scale, five components of scientific thinking were addressed, including experimental design, data…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

Previous research has found that children engage in Level 2 visual perspective-taking, that is, the understanding that others may see things in a different way, between 4 and 5 years of age (e.g., J. H. Flavell, B. A. Everett, K. Croft, & E. R. Flavell, 1981). This ability was reexamined in 36-month-olds using color filters. In Experiment 1 (N =…

Cognitive control, the ability to align our actions with goals or context, is largely absent in children under four. How then are preschoolers able to tailor their behavior to best match the situation? Learning may provide an alternative route to context-sensitive responding. This study investigated this hypothesis in the Dimensional Change Card…

Adolescents' social judgments and emotion attributions about exclusion in three contexts, nationality, gender, and personality, were measured in a sample of 12- and 15-year-old Swiss and non-Swiss adolescents (N = 247). Overall, adolescents judged exclusion based on nationality as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender or personality.…

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--"subcategorization frames"--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant…

This study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and metamemory knowledge using a training methodology. Sixty-two 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: A first-order false belief (ToM) and a control condition. Intervention and control groups were equivalent at pretest for…

Building on longitudinal findings of linkages between aspects of teachers' language during instruction and children's use of mnemonic strategies, this investigation was designed to examine experimentally the impact of instruction on memory development. First and second graders ("N" = 54, "M"[subscript age] = 7 years)…