Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children's success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. I...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal predictive relationships among variables that may contribute to poor phonological awareness skills in preschool-age children with speech-sound disorders. METHOD Forty-seven children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the spring of their prekindergarten year and again at the end of their kindergarten year. Hierarch...

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming, morphologi...

In this paper, we make a fundamental distinction between literacy attainment scores and the actual process of learning to read, and examine these two aspects of reading in atypical development. Reading skills in a group of children and adults with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS) were compared to a group of typically developing children matched for reading age and receptive vocabular...

The present study investigated the role that comprehending words for objects plays in 10- and 11-month-old infants' ability to individuate those objects in a spatiotemporally ambiguous event. To do this, we employed an object individuation task in which infants were familiarized to two objects coming in and out from behind a screen in alternation, and then the screen was removed to reveal eithe...

The purpose of this study was to compare the phonological awareness abilities of 2 groups of 4-year-old children: one with normally developing speech and language skills and the other with moderately or severely delayed expressive phonological skills but age-appropriate receptive vocabulary skills. Each group received tests of articulation, receptive vocabulary, phonemic perception, early liter...

Indirect effects of preschool classroom indexes of teacher talk were tested on fourth-grade outcomes for 57 students from low-income families in a longitudinal study of classroom and home influences on reading. Detailed observations and audiotaped teacher and child language data were coded to measure content and quantity of verbal interactions in preschool classrooms. Preschool teachers' use of...

This longitudinal secondary analysis examined which early language and speech abilities are associated with school-aged reading skills, and whether these associations are mediated by cognitive ability. We analyzed vocabulary, syntax, speech sound maturity, and cognition in a sample of healthy children at age 3 years (N = 241) in relation to single word reading (decoding), comprehension, and ora...