This study investigated whether transitory and persistent poverty spells were associated with children's learning (literacy and numeracy scores) and executive function outcomes in Ghana. Children resided in the Greater Accra region (N = 2,154; 49% female; M[subscript age] = 5.2 years at wave-1) and were followed at four-time points over three…

People sometimes commit 'egocentric errors', failing to ignore their own perspective when interpreting others' communication. Training imitation-inhibition, when participants perform the opposite action from another person, facilitates subsequent perspective-taking in adults. This study tested whether imitation-inhibition training also facilitates…

This study investigated whether transitory and persistent poverty spells were associated with children's learning (literacy and numeracy scores) and executive function outcomes in Ghana. Children resided in the Greater Accra region (N = 2,154; 49% female; M[subscript age] = 5.2 years at wave-1) and were followed at four-time points over three…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

Purpose: Published data indicate nearly adultlike frequency discrimination in infants but large child -adult differences for school-age children. This study evaluated the role that differences in measurement procedures and stimuli may have played in the apparent nonmonotonicity. Frequency discrimination was assessed in preschoolers, young…

An elicited production study investigated subject--aux inversion in 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 control groups, typically-developing 5-year-old children and 3-year-old children matched by mean length of utterance. The experimental findings showed that children with specific language impairment produced…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…

Purpose: Most acoustic and articulatory studies on /l/ have focused on either duration, formant frequencies, or tongue shape during the constriction interval. Only a limited set of data exists for the transition characteristics of /l/ to and from surrounding vowels. The aim of this study was to examine second formant (F2) transition…

Despite its importance for furthering social relationships, the development of the emotional lexicon has seldom been studied. Recent research suggests that during childhood, emotion words are acquired less rapidly than concrete words, but more rapidly than abstract words. The present study directly compared the comprehension of emotion words with…

The current study examined the effect of speaker variability on children's cross-situational word learning (XSWL). The study also examined the role of bilingual experience and sustained attention. Forty English monolingual children and 40 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-7 completed a XSWL task in a Single Speaker Condition and a Multiple…

An object's mental representation includes not just visible attributes but also its nonvisible history. The present studies tested whether preschoolers seek subtle indicators of an object's history, such as a mark acquired during its handling. Five studies with 169 children 3-5 years of age and 97 college students found that children (like adults)…

Autism spectrum disorder is the fastest growing developmental disability in the United States. As such, there is an unprecedented need for research examining factors contributing to the health disparities in this population. This research suggests a relationship between the levels of physical activity and health outcomes. In fact, excessive…

Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play. We tested whether…

We investigated the kinds of biological properties that children aged 3-6 years attribute to animals, plants, and artifacts by administering a property attribution task and eliciting explanations for the resulting property attributions. Findings indicated that, from the age of 3 years, children more frequently attribute properties to animals than…

Across a series of four experiments with 3- to 4-year-olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration of a novel action led children to select a novel, rather than a familiar object. In Experiment 2 (n = 78) children exhibited long-term…