Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on…

Little is known about the development of procrastination, the tendency to postpone undesirable but necessary tasks, during early childhood. Only one study has measured procrastination behavior in preschool children using a single behavioral task (Sutter et al., 2018). Thus, the present study investigated the emergence and development of everyday…

The purpose of this study was to examine the development and characteristics of invented notation for musical representation. A total of 168 young children aged 3, 4 and 5 years participated in this study. The children listened to rhythm and melody, which represented music, to reveal their use of invented notation. The Korean children used various…

This study had three goals: to examine the stability of deficits in the phonological and lexical routes in dyslexia (group study), to determine the prevalence of dyslexia profiles (multiple-case study), and to identify the prediction of phonemic segmentation and discrimination skills before reading acquisition on future reading level. Among a…

Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

Research Findings: This study examined age-based developmental trajectories of four key number sense (NS) skills within an accelerated longitudinal design. Using data from 408 preschoolers, ages 45 to 68 months, linear and latent basis growth curves were evaluated. Results indicated growth across NS skills was best represented as nonlinear for all…

Verbally reported long-term memory for past events typically improves with age. However, such findings are based exclusively on studies, where children are directly asked to recall. The present study showed that when 3- (n = 113, 59 girls) and 4-year-olds (n = 113, 62 girls), predominantly White, were brought back to a distinct laboratory-setting…

Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist's time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and…

Digitalization can potentially benefit the creative and cognitive development of children. This study aims to analyze this impact on a sample of preschool children. A total of 80 preschoolers were divided into four groups based on their age and program variables: there were two groups (control and training) of children aged 3 to 4 years and two…

Before formal instruction, preschoolers represent words in print in various degrees of conventionality. Unlicensed letters are letters that have no connection to the word that the child is aiming to write; they are neither licensed by phoneme-grapheme rules nor by orthographical representations in the mental lexicon. In the current paper, we…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

This study aims at investigating the relationship between working memory updating and working memory capacity in preschool children. A sample of 176 preschoolers (36-74 months) was administered a working memory updating task (Magic House) along with three working memory capacity tests that specifically measure their core attentional component (M…

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is related to disparities in the development of both language and executive functioning (EF) skills. Emerging evidence suggests that language development may precede and provide necessary scaffolding for EF development in early childhood. The present preregistered study investigates how these skills co-develop…

Experimentally manipulating Approximate Number System (ANS) precision has been found to influence children's subsequent symbolic math performance. Here in three experiments (N = 160; 81 girls; 3-5 year old) we replicated this effect and examined its duration and developmental trajectory. We found that modulation of 5-year-olds' ANS precision…