Consequences of theory of mind (ToM) development for daily social lives of children are uncertain. Five to 13-year-olds (N = 195) with typical development, autism, or deafness (both native and late signers) took ToM tests and their teachers reported on their social skills for peer interaction (e.g., leadership, group entry). Groups differed in…

Research Findings: Students experienced a mindfulness program designed to enhance their self-regulation in prekindergarten and kindergarten. At the end of the 1st year of the program, these students showed improvements in teacher-reported executive function skills, specifically related to working memory and planning and organizing, whereas…

This article reports a post hoc analysis conducted as part of a larger study in which 61 typically developing, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assessed in phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional), and grammatical skill at baseline and 3, 6, and 9 months later. The larger study's purpose was to shed light…

Research Findings: This study used data from a national sample to examine differences in school outcomes at the end of kindergarten between Head Start children who attended full-day and half-day programs. Propensity scores were used to match children who experienced different intensities of the program on a series of demographic characteristics in…

Most vocabulary growth during the school-age years occurs incidentally. However, little is understood about the influence of language skills on word knowledge growth during reading. Using a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, we examined incidental word learning through reading, considering the presence/absence of supportive context and…

Research on examinees' response changes on multiple-choice tests over the past 80 years has yielded some consistent findings, including that most examinees make score gains by changing answers. This study expands the research on response changes by focusing on a high-stakes admissions test--the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures…

Creativity of the individual is dependent on numerous factors, such as knowledge, general intelligence and emotional intelligence. The general purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of general intelligence, emotional intelligence and academic knowledge on the emerging of domain-specific creativity. The study was conducted on 178…

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7-12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

The Social Attribution Task, Multiple Choice is introduced as a measure of implicit social cognitive ability in children, addressing a key challenge in quantification of social cognitive function in autism spectrum disorder, whereby individuals can often be successful in explicit social scenarios, despite marked social adaptive deficits. The…

This study aimed to provide evidence regarding the efficacy of an early literacy preparation program, "PreLit", designed to improve the skills of young Australian children. Participants comprised 240 children in eight schools attending their first year of schooling. Children in the four experimental group schools received instruction in…

We explored longitudinal effects of a two-generation preschool programme on receptive language scores in children (n = 78) at age 10 years, living with low income. Scores at four time-points, programme intake, exit, age 7, and age 10 years were measured using the "Peabody picture vocabulary test" (3rd ed.). Effects of culture…

Thirty-four children, with autism spectrum disorders, ages 4-14 years, were matched and randomly assigned to one of two conditions for learning a novel juice-making task and producing two novel words about the event. Seventeen sighted children were manually guided to perform the task and tactually prompted during imitated productions of novel…

On average, Austin Independent School District prekindergarten students scored below the national average range on a test for receptive vocabulary ability in Fall 2012. English language learner students (ELLs) scored lower, on average, than did non-ELLs.

The linear loadings of intelligence test composite scores on a general factor ("g") have been investigated recently in factor analytic studies. Spearman's law of diminishing returns (SLODR), however, implies that the "g" loadings of test scores likely decrease in magnitude as g increases, or they are nonlinear. The purpose of…