Age-related developments in sleep during the preschool years are normative and consequential. Yet, very few studies have examined the antecedents of individual differences in such developments, and most have used parental reports of child sleep. This study aimed to investigate the roles of mutual responsiveness in mother-child interactions and…

High achievers vary in terms of the constraints and difficulties they encounter on the road to success. The present study investigates whether and how children consider the constraints one overcomes in their beliefs and reasoning about academic achievement. Four- to nine-year-olds (N = 98, 57 girls, 41 boys) and their parents (N = 92, 80 females,…

Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children's vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance…

Purpose: This study examined the speech acoustic characteristics of Jamaican Creole (JC) and English in bilingual preschoolers and adults using acoustic duration measures. The aims were to determine if, for JC and English, (a) child and adult acoustic duration characteristics differ, (b) differences occur in preschoolers' duration patterns based…

Within an Orff-based program implemented in Israel, this mixed-methods study examined the effects of age on emerging rhythmic literacy in children. Participants (N = 132) were kindergarteners (n = 45) and first-graders (n = 87) aged 4 to 7.8 years. The participants performed a rhythm entitled "Rhythm-A" through the body and instrumental…

This special issue aims at provoking discussion on the systematic contribution that ethnographic studies in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can make to enquire into the question: "What matters in early childhood education and care?" In so doing this issue examines "what" matters and "how" ECEC…

In a cohort of kindergarten children in Ontario, Canada with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (n = 1522), we tested the association of age at ASD diagnosis and characteristics of (1) the child's primary care provider and, (2) the child using health administrative databases. We tested the association of primary care practice model and time from…

As children increasingly interact with digital voice assistants, it is important to know whether they treat these devices as reliable information sources. Two studies investigated children's trust in and recall of statements made by a novel voice assistant and a human informant. In Study 1, children ages 4-5 (M[subscript age] = 5.05; 20 boys, 20…

Background: Research finds center-based child care typically benefits children of low socio-economic status (SES) but few studies have examined if it also reduces inequalities in developmental disadvantage. Objective: I test if the length of time in center-based care between ages one and three years associates with child development scores at age…

This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized…

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…

Purpose: This study examines the influence of lexical and phonological factors on expressive lexicon size in 40 French-speaking children tested longitudinally from 22 to 48 months. The factors include those based on the lexical and phonological properties of words in the children's lexicons (phonetic complexity, word length, neighborhood density…

This research investigated how children build up the language-specific system of the color lexicon, examining factors that play important roles for the construction of an adult-like color lexicon. We had 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Japanese-speaking children and adults (n = 20, 18, 19, and 19, respectively) produce names for 93 color swatches. The…

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how…

We investigated performance levels on conducting continuous two-footed jumping of preschool children (4 years old) to high school students (16 years old) to clarify the developmental progression and sex differences in motor coordination and agility. In total, 450 children (boys: 227; girls: 223) participated in this study. We set 10 obstacles to…