This brief report focusing on children' s kindergarten readiness i s the third in a series of reports describing data from the 2009 cohort of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES 2009). Previous FACES 2009 reports described the characteristics of children and their families and programs as they entered Head Start in fall 2009…

This research examines whether there are continuities between infant social attention and later theory of mind. Forty-five children were studied as infants and then again as 4-year-olds. Measures of infant social attention (decrement of attention during habituation to displays of intentional action) significantly predicted later theory of mind…

A 2003 paper in this journal reported results from a large sample of twins assessed at 2, 3 and 4 years of age on parent-administered tests and reports of their verbal and nonverbal ability. We found clear evidence for phenotypic general cognitive ability (g) that accounted for about 50% of the variance, for modest genetic influence on g (about…

Full-day pre-K students from the 2001-2002 cohort were more likely to pass the 2010 7th-grade reading TAKS than were kindergarten students from the 2002-2003 cohort who were assumed eligible for pre-K but did not attend pre-K in 2001-2002. There is a full report and a separate executive summary report. [For the executive summary of this study, see…

Background: Children with Down's syndrome seem to show a preference for the use of gestural rather than vocal productions during the first stages of language development. This "gestural advantage" could actually be due to a developmental strategy used to compensate the difficulties in verbal production that are typical of language…

The importance of cognitive and language skills on reading and spelling development were investigated in a cross-linguistic longitudinal study of 737 English-speaking children (US/Australia) and 169 Scandinavian children (Norway/Sweden) from preschool to Kindergarten and Grade 1. The results revealed that phonological awareness and print knowledge…

Background: Infants and preschoolers with ASD show impairment in their responses to other people's distress relative to children with other developmental delays and typically developing children. This deficit is expected to disrupt social interactions, social learning, and the formation of close relationships. Response to distress has not been…

This study tested a sample of 63 children twice in a longitudinal design over 14 months to examine their theory-of-mind (ToM) understanding in relation to their number of child-aged siblings (1-12 years). Age-appropriate batteries of ToM tests emphasising false belief were given at the start of the study, when children had a mean age of 4-2…

A longitudinal study reported positive speech and language outcomes for 29 children with hearing loss in an auditory-verbal therapy program (AVT group) (aged 2 to 6 years at start; mean PTA 79.39 dB HL) compared with a matched control group with typical hearing (TH group) at 9, 21, and 38 months after the start of the study. The current study…

This study examined longitudinally the double-deficit hypothesis in Greek, an orthographically consistent language, following a group of children from kindergarten to Grade 2. Four groups were formed on the basis of two composite scores of phonological and naming-speed criterion measures: a double-deficit group (DD; n = 17), a phonological deficit…

Research Findings: The present study used a longitudinal design to identify how sleep habits and learning-related behaviors impact the development of cognitive skills in preschoolers (ages 3-5). Sixty- seven children with parental report and cognitive skill assessment data were included. Scores on the Differential Ability Scales (C. Elliott, 1990)…

Despite robust associations between children's theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) skills, longitudinal studies examining this association remain scarce. In a socially diverse sample of 122 children (seen at ages 2, 3, and 4), this study examined (a) developmental stability of associations between ToM, EF, verbal ability, and social…

The present study analyzed data from the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia to investigate the factors to which mothers of children with and without familial risk for dyslexia attribute the causes of their first-grade children's reading achievement. Mothers' causal attributions were assessed three times during their children's first school…

Our understanding of the effects of midbrain damage on cognition is largely based on animal studies, though there have been occasional investigations of the effects of human midbrain lesions on cognition. This investigation of a rare case of a glioma initially confined to the dorsal midbrain explores the effects of disease progression on IQ,…

This 5-year prospective longitudinal study of 70,000+ English children examined the association between psychometric intelligence at age 11 years and educational achievement in national examinations in 25 academic subjects at age 16. The correlation between a latent intelligence trait (Spearman's "g"from CAT2E) and a latent trait of…