Both expressive and receptive language difficulties in autism emerge early and significantly have an impact on social functioning and quality of life. Despite their wide heterogeneity, autistic language abilities can be stratified into three distinct profiles. Language unimpaired exhibit near-typical verbal performance, language impaired show…

Music has been shown to improve social interaction and attention to verbal stimuli in autism. We report a feasibility randomised controlled trial of an online intervention using music-assisted programmes, compared with best-practice treatment (Social Communication Intervention for Pre-schoolers-Intensive) for language learning in preschool…

Background: Within cohorts of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) there is considerable variation in terms of language ability. In the past, it was believed that children with ASD either had delayed articulation and phonology skills or excelled in those areas compared to other language domains. Very little is known about speech sound…

Income-based childcare programs provide children access to developmentally appropriate and vocabulary-rich literacy experiences. For this study, participating U.S. Head Start Centers requested families complete a weekly home literacy log to encourage vocabulary-rich shared book reading activities in the home. Using participant characteristics,…

The perspective of emergent literacy was applied to investigate the name-writing skills of 4-year-old, low-income Mandarin Chinese-speaking children in Taiwan. One hundred and eleven children in Taiwan were recruited from 12 public preschools. Children were individually assessed with a name-writing task, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary…

Research has identified that children differ in the extent to which they spontaneously focus on numerical aspects of the environment (Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity, SFON) and that this correlates with their mathematics achievement. It is assumed that the mechanism underpinning this relationship is that children who spontaneously focus on…

The changed sentence: The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the Emotion Matching Task (EMT) in a sample of Croatian preschool children. The Croatian version of the EMT was applied to 198 children (52% female), together with measures of verbal ability and social competence. The internal structure of the test, as…

Purpose: Sign language, like spoken language, incorporates phonological and articulatory (or motor) processing components. Thus, the learning of novel signs, like novel spoken word forms, may be problematic for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In the present work, we hypothesize that phonological and articulatory deficits in…

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…

Socioeconomic attainment gaps in mathematical ability are evident before children begin school, and widen over time. Little is known about why early attainment gaps emerge. Two cross-sectional correlational studies were conducted in 2018-2019 with socioeconomically diverse preschoolers, to explore four factors that might explain why attainment…

This study aimed to investigate the gap between adaptive functioning and cognitive functioning, especially verbal and nonverbal intelligence quotient (IQ) in Chinese children with ASD. We systematically explored cognitive functioning, ASD severity, early signs of developmental abnormalities, and socioeconomic factors as mediating factors of…

This study compared preschool spoken language outcomes for children with hearing loss who met the Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) guidelines to those who did not, as well as compared outcomes for those who met the current EHDI guidelines to those who met the earlier benchmarks. Finally, the predictive role of meeting each component…

The present study examines the link between children's number of older siblings and their cognitive development, as measured by executive function (EFs) skills and verbal skills (VIQ) in a sample of 1,302 4-year-old children (54% boys) living in rural Pakistan. Specifically, we investigate whether the links between the number of older siblings and…

Inhibitory control (IC) ability in early childhood is associated with positive socioemotional, academic, and behavioural outcomes later in life. However, inhibitory control in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not well understood. We conducted a large, cross-sectional study comparing IC ability of young children with ASD and…

The present study examined how culture and gender influence the self-construal of mothers and their four-year-olds during dyadic reminiscing. Participants were 21 Thai (11 girls, 10 boys) and 21 American (10 girls, 11 boys) mother-child dyads. Thai dyads exhibited a more interdependent self-construal, whereas American dyads exhibited a more…