In this study, we examined the developmental pathways from children's family environment to school readiness within a low-income sample (N = 1,046), with a specific focus on the role of sustained attention. Six distinct factors of the family environment representing maternal parenting behaviors, the physical home environment, and maternal mental health at 3 years of age were explored as indepen...

The present study investigated whether individual differences in working memory could account for a significant proportion of the variance in the open-set word recognition and receptive vocabulary skills of prelingually deafened, pediatric cochlear implant recipients, after the contribution of known predictors was taken into account. The contributions of four measures of working memory were exa...

Adolescent survivors of preterm birth experience persistent functional problems that negatively impact academic outcomes, even when standardized measures of cognition and language suggest normal ability. In this fMRI study, we compared the neural activation supporting auditory sentence comprehension in two groups of adolescents (ages 9-16 years); sentences varied in length and syntactic difficu...

Of 1,327 children younger than two in 1986 whose mothers were participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 61% were wanted, 34% were mistimed and 5% were unwanted. Planning status is associated with the level of developmental resources the child receives at home: At ages one and older, mistimed and unwanted children score significantly lower on a scale measuring opportunity for sk...

This research examined the relative contributions of two aspects of executive function-inhibitory control and planning ability-to theory of mind in 49 3- and 4-year-olds. Children were given two standard theory of mind measures (Appearance-Reality and False Belief), three inhibitory control tasks (Bear/Dragon, Whisper, and Gift Delay), three planning tasks (Tower of Hanoi, Truck Loading, and Ki...

A forward-gating procedure employing highly familiar monosyllabic words was used in auditory testing of age- and gender-matched children with learning disabilities and normally achieving children aged 8 to 11 years. The portion of the word presented, or "gate," was longer on each successive trial. Nondisabled children identified an average of one more word than the children with learning disabi...

PURPOSE This study evaluated the impact of socioeconomic factors on children's performance on tests of working memory and vocabulary. METHOD Twenty Brazilian children, aged 6 and 7 years, from low-income families, completed tests of working memory (verbal short-term memory and verbal complex span) and vocabulary (expressive and receptive). A further group of Brazilian children from families o...

During preschool years, major developments occur in both executive function and theory of mind (ToM), and several studies have demonstrated a correlation between these processes. Research on the development of inhibitory control (IC) has distinguished between more cognitive, "cool" aspects of self-control, measured by conflict tasks, that require inhibiting an habitual response to generate an a...

This study investigated whether it is possible to provide naturalistic second language acquisition (SLA) of vocabulary for young learners in a classroom situation without resorting to a classical immersion approach. Participants were 60 first-grade pupils in two Norwegian elementary schools in their first year. The control group followed regular instruction as prescribed by the school curriculu...