Individual differences in spatial thinking are predictive of children's math and science achievement and later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Little is known about whether parent characteristics predict individual differences in children's spatial thinking. This study aims to understand whether,…

This article assessed changes in the association between single motherhood and children's verbal cognitive ability at age-11 using data from three cohorts of British children, born in 1958 (n = 10,675), 1970 (n = 8,933) and 2000 (n = 9,989), and mediation analysis. Consistent with previous studies, direct effects were small and insignificant. For…

Children with autism often display discrepancies in their intellectual functioning, with nonverbal skills frequently being more developed than verbal. Compared to monolingual autistic children, however, much less is known about how bilingualism affects intelligence in autism. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 146 bilingual…

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with children's internalizing and externalizing problems. IPV is thought to impair mothers' ability to scaffold young children's emotion regulation through coregulated interactions. Mother-child language style matching (LSM) is an index of coregulation that has yet to be examined in…

Purpose: This study compared perception of consonants in medial position by preschoolers, with and without speech sound disorder (SSD), with similar vocabulary and language skills. In addition, we investigated the association between speech perception and production skills. Method: Participants were 36 monolingual English-speaking children with…

Researchers studying parent-child reminiscing in the preschool years have often focused on parents' and children's elaborative talk (i.e., provision of unique details). The current study proposes a novel conceptualization of parent-child reminiscing narratives by examining 4 levels of abstraction (i.e., a continuum of literal to inferential…

This study examined the association between observed cognitive sensitivity (CS) during family interactions and children's receptive vocabulary for older and younger siblings. Maternal and sibling CS was considered and associations were explored at the family-wide (between-family) and child-specific (within-family) levels of analysis. The…

A wealth of literature has examined the association between breastfeeding and the development of cognitive abilities in childhood. In particular, at least some evidence exists suggesting that breastfed children perform better on measures of intelligence later in life. Although a correlation appears to be present, fewer observational studies have…

The present study examined the longitudinal associations among birth weight status, maternal warmth, and children's cognitive competence within an at-risk sample (N = 1809) drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. Of particular interest was whether birth weight moderated the associations between maternal warmth and indicators of…

We describe the performance of 292 4- to 17-year-olds with Williams syndrome (WS) on the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-2 (KBIT-2; Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004). Mean IQ Composite, Verbal standard score (SS), and Nonverbal SS were in the borderline range relative to the general population, with variability similar to the general population.…

Alleviating disadvantage in low-income environments predicts higher cognitive abilities during early childhood. It is less established whether family income continues to predict cognitive growth in later childhood or whether there may even be bidirectional dynamics. Notably, living in poverty may moderate income-cognition dynamics. In this study,…

Research Findings: The present study investigated the social and cognitive precursors of vocabulary knowledge in 239 Turkish preschoolers both concurrently (Time 1 [T1] Mage = 53.29 months, SD = 10.19) and subsequently 1 year later (Time 2 [T2] Mage = 65.40 months, SD = 10.55). We examined the role of parenting behaviors by focusing on emotional…

We examined whether the early learning environment predicts children's 5th grade skills in 2,204 families from ethnically diverse, low-income backgrounds; tested the mediating roles of children's pre-kindergarten school-related skills and later learning environment; and asked whether lagged associations generalize across White, Black, Hispanic…

This study extends the methodological and theoretical understanding of executive functions (EFs) in preschoolers from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). First, the authors describe a rigorous process of adapting and evaluating six EF tasks to produce a culturally and developmentally appropriate measure of emerging EFs in a large sample of…

This is a report of an examination of gender differences in behavior problems and a prediction of their changes from 2.5 to 3.5 years from mothering qualities among 209 low-income Hispanic children. Externalizing behaviors declined over this time somewhat more for girls than for boys. Fewer externalizing behavior problems at age 3.5 were…