We explored associations among the core behavioural features and developmental/cognitive abilities of 155 autistic children, assessed between ages 13-67 months and again around 1-year later to understand predictive directionality. Bidirectional, cross-domain association was apparent, albeit with stronger direction of effect from earlier cognition…

This study examined the cognitive predictors and constraints of children's strategic offers in the Ultimatum Game. The Ultimatum Game is a one-shot negotiation on the division of a given sum of rewards between two people, where the receiver has the right to punish the proposer by rejecting unfair offers, which results in nil reward for either…

Background: Despite accumulated evidence that language development depends on basic cognitive processes, the balance in contributions of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills to language abilities is still underexplored. Little is known about which cognitive measures best predict the degree of severity in children with language disorder (LD).…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with…

This study utilized data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 14,860) to examine whether early-life family income (age 0-5) predicted long-term academic achievement (age 16-18) and to investigate the role of executive function (EF) assessed multiple times across age 7-11 in explaining this association. Task-based EF was a…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine whether otitis media (OM) in early childhood has an impact on language development in later childhood. Methods: We analyzed data from 1,344 second-generation (Generation 2) participants in the Raine Study, a longitudinal pregnancy cohort established in Perth, Western Australia, between 1989 and 1991. OM…

Few studies have examined growth and predictors of receptive vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder. Here we aimed to compare receptive vocabulary from 4 to 8 years and identify predictors of receptive vocabulary, at 8 years, in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Participants were drawn from a nationally…

Inference making is fundamental to the construction of a coherent mental model of a text. We examined how vocabulary and verbal working memory relate to inference development concurrently and longitudinally in 4- to 9-year-olds. Four hundred and twenty prekindergartners completed oral assessments of inference making, vocabulary breadth, vocabulary…

Despite rapidly growing research on parental influences on children's executive function (EF), the uniqueness and specificity of parental predictors and links between adult EF and parenting remain unexamined. This 13-month longitudinal study of 117 parent-child dyads (60 boys; M[subscript age] at Time 1 = 3.94 years, SD = 0.53) included detailed…

The development of emotion understanding in young Chinese preschoolers was examined. The overall developmental trend, as measured by the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), proved similar to that found among preschoolers in Western Europe. However, Chinese children performed better at understanding the distinction between real and apparent…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

Theory of mind describes the ability to engage in perspective-taking, infer mental states, and predict intentions, behavior, and actions in others. Theory of mind performance is associated with foundational cognitive and socioemotional skills, including verbal ability (receptive and expressive vocabulary), executive function (inhibitory control…

International research suggests that early mathematical competences predicts later mathematical outcomes. In this paper, we build on our previous study of young children's mathematical competencies (MacDonald & Carmichael, 2015) to explore the relationship between mathematical competencies at 4-5 years, as measured by teacher ratings, and…