Children practice their spatial skills when playing with spatial toys, such as construction materials, board games, and puzzles. Sex and SES differences are observed in the engagement in such spatial play activities at home, which relate to individual differences in spatial performance. The current study investigated the effects of explicitly…

Over half of the children in the U.S. experience adversity early in childhood. These experiences, along with conditions in their families and neighborhoods, have profound developmental effects. The bioecological model of development includes these proximal contexts in a theory of development that incorporates the threats and supports present in…

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension is an important predictor of reading comprehension, especially as children progress through elementary school and later grades. Yet, there is a dearth of research examining longitudinal relations between linguistic comprehensions in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of digital and non-digital storybooks on low-income preschoolers' oral language comprehension. Employing a within-subject design on 38 four-year-olds from a Head Start program, we compared the effect of medium on preschoolers' target words and comprehension of stories. Four digital…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at heightened risk for developing comorbid psychological disorders, including anxiety disorders, which may be further exacerbated by the presence of externalizing behaviors. Here, we examined how structural language and pragmatic language predicted anxiety and externalizing behaviors. Participants…

This article addresses giftedness in the context of individual response that emerges as a quality of gifted as differentiated from that which is measurable. The author recounts examples that reflect insight rather than those that simply produce correctness and proficiency. With reference to Gunnar Myrdal, she discusses this difference as a…

We recently proposed the Creative Reasoning Test (CRT), a test for reasoning in ill-defined problem spaces. The test asks children who first performed the Standard Progressive Matrices test (SPM) to next generate an SPM-style test item themselves. The item is scored based on different aspects of its complexity. Here we introduce a method to…

Child prodigies are unusual for their early and exceptional adoption of what are traditionally thought of as adult abilities. As part of an effort to better understand the underpinnings of these extraordinary individuals' talent, the researcher examined the cognitive and developmental profiles of eight child prodigies by taking their developmental…

The current research was aimed mainly at exploring the reliability of a short-screening tool developed to self-evaluate visuospatial abilities in children. We presented 290 Italian third, fourth, and fifth graders with the 16-item Shortened Visuospatial questionnaire and several objective measures of intellectual efficiency, such as Raven's…

Research has indicated students can learn both transition planning and a wide variety of academic skills; however, due to recent legislation and the widely adopted Common Core State Standards, transition planning skills are sometimes being de-emphasized in favor of academic instruction. This study used a multiple probe across participants design…

Introduction: The present study provides description of two typologically diverse languages in origin (Slavic vs. Latin), script (Cyrillic vs. Roman), and internal structure. One of the similarities, between the two studied orthographies is that spelling-sound transparency is quite consistent in both languages. The goal of the present study was to…

To evaluate the relative efficacy of two reading programs with and without adjunctive stimulant medication for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and comorbid reading disorder (ADHD+RD). Sixty-five children (7-11 years in age) were assigned randomly to one of three intensive remedial academic programs (phonologically or…

Using a nationally representative sample of dual language learners (DLLs) attending Head Start, this study investigated how the language used for instruction and the proportion of DLLs in the class was associated with English and Spanish receptive vocabulary development between the fall and spring (n = 531). Based on teacher report of the language…

Smith and Farah (2011) provided a thought-provoking and perhaps deliberately provocative literature review of the use of stimulants to improve cognitive functioning in humans. They addressed the apparently increasing willingness of individuals mostly in the United States to use stimulants for this purpose and then summarized published literature…

The linguistic demand of spoken instructions on individually administered norm-referenced psychological and educational tests is of concern when examining individuals who have varying levels of language processing ability or varying cultural backgrounds. The authors present a new method for analyzing the level of verbosity, complexity, and total…