Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a multifactorial, pervasive, neurodevelopmental disorder, of which intestinal symptoms collectively represent one of the most common comorbidities. Methods: In this study, 1,222 children with ASD and 1,206 typically developing (TD) children aged 2-7 years were enrolled from 13 cities in China. Physical…

The third decade of the 21st century has seen a focus emerge on the agentic practices of writers, focusing on what, how and why people write. While considerable research has been conducted on school-age writing practices, there is still limited insight into the writing practices of children outside of school or formal education settings. This…

The natural development of static lower limb varus/valgus alignments during early childhood is well understood. However, our understanding of dynamic lower limb frontal plane alignments is limited, and we lack normative descriptions of this phenomenon for both boys and girls. This study investigated dynamic lower limb alignment during…

The present study sought to evaluate the reproducibility of prominent findings stated by Fehr et al. in their developmental resource allocation experiment "Egalitarianism in Young Children", published in 2008. The experiment involved children making decisions about distributing sweets between themselves and either an in-group or an…

Purpose: It is essential to develop and improve instruments that measure and assess children's attitudes towards the elderly. Despite the degree of questions related to this topic, no tools validated for the Portuguese population on the subject were found in the literature. Consequently, this study aimed to translate and validate a scale designed…

Background: Many studies have examined which kindergarteners' skills best predict reading acquisition later at school. Most of these studies focused on emergent literacy skills such as letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral language abilities as the basis for reading acquisition. Additionally, several studies have also found cognitive…

TOOLBOX is a school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program to teach and reinforce 12 tools (e.g., Breathing Tool, Courage Tool) for healthy youth development. Although TOOLBOX has been broadly adopted, it remains largely untested. This quasi-experimental study aims to examine the relationship between TOOLBOX implementation and the…

The present study aims to examine the issue of peer aggression and victimisation in early childhood, with a focus on the associated social behaviour strategies (aggressiveness, prosociality, dominance and social insecurity). A sample of 227 children (58.1% girls, n = 132) between the ages of 4 and 7 years (M = 5.61; SD = 1. 03) participated in the…

This study examined the implementation of a biodanza program in a kindergarten for five-year-olds. The purpose of the project was to understand the contribution of biodanza to social-emotional learning (SEL) of kindergarten children. The exposure of children to biodanza made it possible to stimulate a social-emotional aspects of children's…

The changing landscape of early childhood education related to accountability-driven assessments is creating the need to understand how these changes effect engagement. Children's engagement in school is one of the leading predictors of learning (Carini et al. in Research in Higher Education 47(1):1-32, 2006; Fredricks et al. in Review of…

In the literature in recent years, a number of developmental studies have demonstrated the importance of children entering the school environment with a solid foundation of mathematical content knowledge and argued that problem solving, as an important mathematical process, should be acknowledged in early childhood mathematical education. However,…

Language development is an important facet of early life. Deaf children may have exposure to various languages and communication modalities, including spoken and visual. Previous research has documented the rate of growth of English skills among young deaf children, but no studies have investigated the rate of ASL acquisition. The current paper…

Preverbal infants spontaneously represent the number of objects in collections. Is this 'sense of number' (also referred to as Approximate Number System, ANS) part of the cognitive foundations of mathematical skills? Multiple studies reported a correlation between the ANS and mathematical achievement in children. However, some have suggested that…

This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word…

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways--as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on…