Parents play an important role in socializing children's emotion understanding. Previous research shows that parents emphasize different aspects of emotion contexts depending on the discrete emotion. However, there is limited research on how parents and children discuss self-conscious emotions, such as embarrassment, guilt, and shame, and what…

Infants' sensitivity to transitional probabilities (TPs) supports language development by facilitating mapping high-TP (HTP) words to meaning, at least up to 18 months of age. Here we tested whether this HTP advantage holds as lexical development progresses, and infants become better at forming word--referent mappings. Two groups of 24-month-olds…

This longitudinal study - conducted in the Midwestern United States - examines the child-level factors that promote Spanish-English bilingual toddlers' (n = 47; M[subscript age] = 18.80 months; SD[subscript age] = 0.57) productive vocabulary skills from 18 to 30 months of age. At 6-month intervals, caregivers reported on toddlers' Spanish and…

Infants who receive better counting input at home tend to become toddlers with better number knowledge in preschool. However, for many children, in-person counting experience is not always available, despite educational media becoming increasingly prevalent. Might virtual counting experience benefit the young mind? Using a novel online looking…

During infancy and toddlerhood, parents show large individual differences in the extent to which they are able to tailor their parenting behaviors to their children's swiftly changing developmental needs. The first aim of our study was, therefore, to distinguish parenting profiles at three time points during infancy and toddlerhood (i.e., 5, 10,…

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned memories compete with currently relevant information. Despite extensive literature investigating the effect in adults, little work has been done in young children. In three preregistered studies (N = 38, 35, 172; convenience samples from the Northeastern United States), first, we showed…

Can well-documented gender differences in evaluations of prosocial versus antisocial actions found in childhood and adulthood be traced to sex differences in basic sociomoral preferences in infancy? We provide an answer to this question by meta-analyzing sex differences in preference for prosocial over antisocial agents in a set of 53 samples of…

While negative associations between behavioral inhibition/shyness and social competence are well established for children from Western cultures, the directions of these associations have been inconsistent for Chinese children, partly due to the ongoing social-cultural changes in China. Drawing from three samples of young Chinese children (born…

Research on the multisensory control of locomotion has demonstrated that adults exhibit auditory-motor entrainment across an array of contexts. In such work adults will consciously modulate the cadence of their walking when instructed to match their footfalls to an auditory metronome equal to, slower than, or faster than, their natural walking…

Early attention bias to threat-related negative emotions may lead children to overestimate dangers in social situations. This study examined its emergence and how it might develop in tandem with a known predictor namely temperamental shyness for toddlers' fear of strangers in 168 Chinese toddlers. Measurable individual differences in such…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

The faces and hands of caregivers and other social partners offer a rich source of social and causal information that is likely critical for infants' cognitive and linguistic development. Previous work using manual annotation strategies and cross-sectional data has found systematic changes in the proportion of faces and hands in the egocentric…

Attentional control in infancy has been postulated as foundational for self-regulation later in life. However, the empirical evidence supporting this claim is inconsistent. In the current study, we examined the longitudinal data from a sample of Swedish infants (6, 10, and 18 months, n = 118, 59 boys) across a broad set of eye-tracking tasks to…

Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document…