As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

School-based screening instruments have traditionally focused on assessing within-child factors, such as a student's academic, social, emotional, behavioral, or physical development. This emphasis in school-based screening may be a missed opportunity to assess and ameliorate contextual factors (i.e., social determinants of health) influencing…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…

This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion--the active involvement of new partners into social interactions--in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In…

We examined the longitudinal relation between behavioral inhibition (BI) and social anxiety symptoms and behavior and the mediating role of emotion regulation (ER). Moreover, we investigated the influence of parenting behavior on the development of ER strategies. Participants were 291 children (135 male) followed longitudinally from 2 to 13 years.…

Playing is essential for the development of higher psychological functions. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that playing constitutes an essential step in children's socio-cognitive development by describing playtime as the indicator of the gradual overcoming of self-centred thinking, with a view to acquiring new social adjustment…

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an "insufficient motivation hypothesis" and an "insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis." With…

The abilities comprising social intelligence are critical to children's development and interpersonal functioning, and there is a need for reliable and valid tools for measuring them. This paper describes the Children's Social Comprehension Scale (CSCS), which is a performance-based test of the cognitive component of social intelligence for young…

Background: Pretend play is a form of play that involves nonliteral actions. There are limited studies reporting the developmental trends of pretend play behaviours of typically developing pre-schoolers. This knowledge would be beneficial in the early identification of deviations in pre-schoolers who have or are at risk of developing developmental…

Learning to regulate aggressive impulses is a significant developmental milestone for preschoolers. To date, there is no consensus about whether rough-and-tumble play (RTP) is positively or negatively related to the regulation of aggression. This study examined the relation of RTP with children's levels of emotion regulation and aggression. RTP of…

It is said that children are amazing at acquiring their first language (L1); by the time they reach school age, they are using complex grammar and demonstrating a wide vocabulary. Even more impressive, these young learners might show up at school with two languages in their toolbox or add a second language (L2) with far less effort than older…

Background: Comprehension is critical for classroom learning and educational success. Inferences are integral to good comprehension: successful comprehension requires the listener to generate local coherence inferences, which involve integrating information between clauses, and global coherence inferences, which involve integrating textual…

Caregivers' sensitive responses to infant cry have long-term consequences for adaptive child development. Although mounting evidence suggests that parents who experience high emotionality to infant cry respond less sensitively to infant cry, there is a dearth of knowledge on potential mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotionality to…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

This study looked at the effect of mother's educational level, child emotional difficulties, peer interactions, age, and gender on children's sophistication level of engagement. Eighty-six randomly selected children, aged between 36 and 72 months, and 20 teachers from 5 early childhood education centers in Valencia, Spain, participated in the…