We examine the extent to which food insecurity questions and the standard poverty measure are correlated with various dietary and physiologic outcomes. Our findings suggest that the correlations vary tremendously by age. We find that the food insecurity questions are correlated with the dietary outcomes of older household members, but that they are not consistently related to the diets of child...

Two studies address the sequence of understandings evident in preschoolers' developing theory of mind. The first, preliminary study provides a meta-analysis of research comparing different types of mental state understandings (e.g., desires vs. beliefs, ignorance vs. false belief). The second, primary study tests a theory-of-mind scale for preschoolers. In this study 75 children (aged 2 years, ...

Literature shows that parent-implemented language interventions have positive effects on children language skills. Nevertheless, studies in this field suffer from two limitations. This pilot study compared the efficiency of two brief self-implemented interventions, each aiming to manipulate a specific parenting language variable, on a non-clinical sample of preschoolers. Sixty participants were...

Although there is now substantial evidence that developmental change occurs in implicit learning abilities over the lifespan, disparate results exist regarding the specific developmental trajectory of implicit learning skills. One possible reason for discrepancies across implicit learning studies may be that younger children show an increased sensitivity to variations in implicit learning task ...

Although a great deal of research has focused on ontological judgments in preschoolers, very little has examined ontological judgments in older children. The present study asked 10-year-olds and adults (N = 94) to judge the reality status of known real, known imagined, and novel entities presented in simple and elaborate contexts and to explain their judgments. Although judgments were generally...

This study focuses on determining the relationship between parents' step count (SC) and screen time (ST) and children's SC and ST on weekdays and at weekends. The participants (278 parents aged 30-45 and their 194 children aged 4-7) were recruited from 10 randomly selected Czech kindergartens. The participants recorded SC and ST duration over a week-long monitoring (≥8 h/day) during September-O...

The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events...

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., Fred blicked the dog a stick) as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., Fred blicked a stick to the dog). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Exp...

 Attendance at preschool has a significant positive impact on later NAPLAN outcomes, particularly in the domains of Numeracy, Reading and Spelling.  The direct causal effects of preschool attendance are equivalent to 10 to 20 NAPLAN points or 15 to 20 weeks of schooling at the Year 3 level, three years after attending preschool.  Children who did not attend preschool would have gained more f...

OBJECTIVE To identify correlates of objectively measured moderate and vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in children during preschool attendance. METHODS This cross-sectional study included data from 426 apparently healthy Danish children (49.5% boys), 5 to 6 years of age enrolled in 42 randomly selected preschools. The percentage of time spent in MVPA (≥ 574 counts/15 second) during preschool...