Across two studies, children ages 6-9 (N = 160, 82 boys, 78 girls; 75% White, 91% non-Hispanic) rated an inaccurate expert's knowledge and provided explanations for the expert's inaccurate statements. In Study 1, children's knowledge ratings decreased as he provided more inaccurate information. Ratings were predicted by age (i.e., older children…

Speech exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities at multiple timescales, which seem to be crucial to comprehension. Both children's ability to extract rhythm from complex stimuli and to produce rhythmic patterns are known to undergo changes from infancy to adulthood. However, it remains unclear what rhythm skills specifically related to speech look…

Research on gesture development has mostly focused on home environments. Little is known about early communicative development in other relevant contexts, such as early-year-schools. These settings, rich in diverse educative situations, objects, and communicative partners, provide a contrast to parent-child interactions, complementing our…

This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate developmental changes in the efficiency of sustained, selective, and divided attention in a group of children aged 6-12 years by means of a computerized test battery. Participants included 199 children (51% female, majority White) who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no history of either…

Few studies on the development of forgiveness involved young children and adolescents, and very few involved samples from non-western countries. This study focused on the development of willingness to forgive a particular transgression in participants aged 4 to 12 years and from two different cultures: a South African culture (Mozambique) and a…

Inhibitory control (IC) is a core executive function integral to self-regulation and cognitive control, yet is itself multi-componential. Directed global inhibition entails stopping an action on demand. Competitive inhibition is engaged when an alternative response must also be produced. Related, but not an executive function, is…

Error-monitoring is a crucial cognitive process that enables us to adapt to the constantly changing environment. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a vital role in error-monitoring, and its prolonged maturation suggests that it can be influenced by experience-dependent plasticity. To explore this possibility, we collected morphometric…

Across the early childhood period of development, young children exhibit considerable growth in their executive functioning (EF) and vocabulary abilities. Understanding the developmental trajectory of these seemingly interrelated processes is important as both early vocabulary and EF have been shown to predict critical academic and socio-emotional…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition affecting information processing across domains. The current meta-analysis investigated whether slower processing speed is associated with the ASD neurocognitive profile and whether findings hold across different time-based tasks and stimuli (social vs. nonsocial; linguistic…

Children comprehend iconic gestures relatively later than deictic gestures. Previous research with English-learning children indicated that they could comprehend iconic gestures at 26 months, a pattern whose extension to other languages is not yet known. The present study examined Turkish-learning children's iconic gesture comprehension and its…

Despite numerous critiques of the pioneering works of developmental child psychology, these key ideas continue to resonate within the field of ECEC (early childhood education and care). This article seeks to re-animate the critique through a closer look at two current tendencies within the Nordic countries: a growing and increasingly strict age…

Purpose: Gesture delay in autistic infants and toddlers has been widely reported. The developmental trajectory of gesture production during early childhood is understudied. Thus, little is known about the possible changes of gesture production over time. The present study aimed to document the development of gesture production in autistic children…

In industrialized societies, adults exhibit stable preferences for the types of people, animals, and entities they feel moral concern for (Crimston et al., 2016). Only one published study to date has utilized the moral circles paradigm to examine these preferences in children, finding that as children age, their preferences shift to become more…

Although most U. S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number -- that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to…

Pretend play is one of the most beneficial and complex forms of play that promotes a myriad of children's development. Children's engagement in pretend play can be influenced by their genders, age, material or toys available, and adults' support. Pretend play has been long studied globally, however, there is still a dearth of available information…