Children's sense of numbers before formal education is thought to rely on an approximate number system based on logarithmically compressed analog magnitudes that increases in resolution throughout childhood. School-age children performing a numerical estimation task have been shown to increasingly rely on a formally appropriate, linear representation and decrease their use of an intuitive, loga...

This study leverages nationally representative data (N ≈ 6,000) to examine the magnitude of quality differences between (a) formal and informal early childhood education and care providers; (b) Head Start, prekindergarten, and other center-based care; and (c) programs serving toddlers and those serving preschoolers. It then documents differences in children's reading and math skills at age 5 be...

The study was designed to determine whether outer-directedness, measured by glances at E during object assembly tasks administered according to the Turnure and Zigler (1964) procedure, predicts changes in preschoolers' Binet IQs over 6 months. With MA as a covariate to control for the small but significant relationship betweeen glances and developmental level, an ANOCOVA showed a significant in...

Pragmatic behavior, or the socially appropriate use of language, is important to parents of preschool children. In 1994 Becker noted several questions that still remain to be answered, including issues such as developmental changes in the pragmatic teaching of preschoolers and whether there are differences in the parents' goals for pragmatic teaching in private versus public interactions. The p...

The authors argue that imitation is a flexible and adaptive learning mechanism in that children do not always reproduce all of the details they can from a demonstration. Instead, they vary their replications depending on their interpretation of the situation. Specifically, the authors propose that when children do not understand the overall reason for a model's behavior, they will be more likel...

Prosocial behavior is arguably influenced by an interaction between intrinsic dispositions (e.g., group bias) and extrinsic factors (e.g., institutional regulations). The current study investigated this interaction developmentally. Preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds) and kindergarteners (5- to 6-year-olds; N = 111) participated in a resource distribution task in which they had to consider both the...

We address the issue of children's understanding of abstract words with two studies on preschoolers' knowledge of the time-duration words minutes, hours, days, and years. The first study examines 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to answer questions about durations of common phenomena with duration terms. The second study examines 4- to 6-year-olds' comprehension of duration terms with a forced-choic...

BACKGROUND Five cycles of data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (1994/5-2002/3) were used to examine patterns of child care use in Quebec and the rest of Canada to explore the impact of Quebec's implementation of universal child care. METHODS Rates of overall use as well as use of regulated (child care centre, family child care) and non-regulated care (sitt...

objective : the major objective of this study was to determine the means and 95% confidence interval of normal 6 years old children's motor-verbal skills. based on the results of this study we could develop a measure to diagnose abnormal motor skills. in addition, in this follow-up study, we compared the first-graders' motor-verbal skills to their own skills one year earlier. method: ...