Orienting Toward Face‐Like Stimuli in Early Childhood

Newborn infants orient preferentially toward face‐like or “protoface” stimuli and recent studies suggest similar reflexive orienting responses in adults. Little is known, however, about the operation of this mechanism in childhood. An attentional‐cueing procedure was therefore developed to investigate protoface orienting in early childhood. Consistent with the extant literature, 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children (n = 25) exhibited orienting toward face‐like stimuli; they responded faster when target location was cued by the appearance of a protoface stimulus than when location was cued by matched control patterns. The potential of this procedure to investigate the development of typical and atypical social perception is discussed.     

Preferences for Explanation Generality Develop Early in Biology But Not Physics

One of the core functions of explanation is to support prediction and generalization. However, some explanations license a broader range of predictions than others. For instance, an explanation about biology could be presented as applying to a specific case (e.g., “this bear”) or more generally across “all animals.” The current study investigated how 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds (N = 36), 11‐ to 13‐year‐olds (N = 34), and adults (N = 79) evaluate explanations at varying levels of generality in biology and physics. Findings revealed that even the youngest children preferred general explanations in biology. However, only older children and adults preferred explanation generality in physics. Findings are discussed in light of differences in our intuitions about biological and physical principles.     

When easy comes hard: the development of adaptive strategy selection

Can children learn to select the right strategy for a given problem? In one experiment, 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds (N = 50), 11‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 50), and adults (N = 50) made probabilistic inferences. Participants encountered environments favoring either an information‐intensive strategy that integrates all available information or an information‐frugal strategy that relies only on the most valid pieces of information. Nine‐ to 10‐year‐olds but not older children or adults had more difficulties learning to select an information‐frugal strategy than an information‐intensive strategy. This counterintuitive finding is explained by children’s less developed ability to selectively attend to relevant information, an ability that seems to develop during late childhood. The results suggest that whether a strategy can be considered “easy” depends on the development of specific cognitive abilities.     

The influence of being ready to learn on children’s early school literacy and numeracy achievement

This study investigated the extent to which learning readiness, prior‐to‐school experiences, and child and family characteristics influence children’s literacy and numeracy achievement across the first year of primary school. A sample of 104 kindergarten children was recruited from 16 classrooms and followed from the beginning to the end of their first year of primary school. At the start of school, parents provided information on children’s prior‐to‐school experiences and their preparedness for school; teachers provided ratings of children’s self‐directedness and cooperative participation; and children’s cognitive ability was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – III. Classroom quality was observed and rated mid‐year. Children’s literacy and numeracy achievement was assessed at the end of the school year, using the Who Am I? (WAI?). Regression analyses indicated that WAI? scores were predicted by child age, gender, cognitive ability and teacher‐rated learning readiness at the start of school. Discussion focuses on the importance of the ‘ready child’ for early academic success.     

Exploring Trajectories of Young Mothers’ Parenting Stress in Early Childhood: Associations with Protective Factors and Psychological Vulnerabilities

SYNOPSIS

Objective . Most parents manage some degree of parenting stress without serious concerns, but young mothers experience parenting stress at higher levels than adult mothers; high parenting stress is problematic due to its association with children’s socioemotional and behavior problems and the increased likelihood of maltreatment. Understanding the circumstances that precipitate or mitigate parents’ stress can have lasting impacts for child well-being. Extant research fails to account for both longitudinal and individual variation in young mothers’ parenting stress, leading to equivocal findings about the nature of mothers’ parenting stress trajectories across early childhood. Design . The present study used growth mixture modeling (GMM) to model the trajectories of 544 first-time young mothers’ parenting stress from children’s infancy to school-age. We considered how protective factors (i.e., social support) and psychological vulnerabilities (i.e., depression) experienced during the transition to parenthood were associated with parenting stress trajectories and variation within trajectories when children were of school-age. Results . GMM identified three trajectories of parenting stress: “low stable”, “high increasing”, and “high decreasing.” Protective factors were related to low and decreasing patterns of parenting stress, whereas psychological vulnerabilities were associated with higher parenting stress patterns. Conclusions . This study has implications for programs and services that help young mothers cope with the demands of parenting and reduce parenting stress.     

“American = English Speaker” Before “American = White”: The Development of Children's Reasoning About Nationality

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more “American” than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of individuals varying in race and language. Across cultures, 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 100) categorized English speakers as “American” and Korean speakers as “Korean” regardless of race, suggesting that young children prioritize language over race when thinking about nationality. Nine‐ and 10‐year‐olds (N = 181) attended to language and race and their nationality judgments varied across cultures. These results suggest that associations between nationality and social category membership emerge early in life and are shaped by cultural context.     

The contribution of attentional processes to calculation skills in second and third grade in a typically developing sample

Attention is an important, multifaceted cognitive domain that includes many key cognitive processes involved in learning. This study aimed to identify the predictive links between different components of attentional skills and core calculation skills development, using two standardized measures assessing calculation (AC-MT 6–11) and attention skills (CAS) in a sample of 143 typically developing children of age range from 7.6 years to 9.4 years. The results showed that in 2nd grade, selective visuo-spatial attention emerged as an important predictor in the written calculation task, while the ability to inhibit distracting information seemed to better predict accuracy in oral calculation. In 3rd grade, visuo-spatial components of attention emerged as no longer predictive, whereas planning and active visuo-spatial attention abilities emerged as predictive of accuracy in the oral calculation task. These results confirm previous findings about the contribution that attentional skills may have in calculation skills development, supporting evidence for progressive automation attentional components over time.

     

Pathways From Toddler Information Processing to Adolescent Lexical Proficiency

This study examined the relation of 3‐year core information‐processing abilities to lexical growth and development. The core abilities covered four domains—memory, representational competence (cross‐modal transfer), processing speed, and attention. Lexical proficiency was assessed at 3 and 13 years with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and verbal fluency. The sample (N = 128) consisted of 43 preterms (< 1750 g) and 85 full‐terms. Structural equation modeling indicated concurrent relations of toddler information processing and language proficiency and, independent of stability in language, direct predictive links between (a) 3‐year cross‐modal ability and 13‐year PPVT and (b) 3‐year processing speed and both 13‐year measures, PPVT and verbal fluency. Thus, toddler information processing was related to growth in lexical proficiency from 3 to 13 years.     

What Will I Like Best When I'm All Grown Up? Preschoolers' Understanding of Future Preferences

Three experiments investigated 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds' (N = 240) understanding that their future or “grown‐up” preferences may differ from their current ones (self‐future condition). This understanding was compared to children's understanding of the preferences of a grown‐up (adult‐now condition) or the grown‐up preferences of a same‐aged peer (peer‐future condition). Children's performance across all three conditions improved significantly with age. Moreover, children found it significantly more difficult to reason about their own future preferences than they did to reason either about an adult's preferences or the future preferences of a peer. These results have important implications for theories about future thinking and perspective‐taking abilities, more broadly.     

Do home numeracy and literacy practices of Greek and Canadian parents predict the numeracy skills of kindergarten children?

Children’s experiences with early numeracy and literacy activities are a likely source of individual differences in their preparation for academic learning in school. What factors predict differences in children’s experiences? We hypothesised that relations between parents’ practices and children’s numeracy skills would mediate the relations between numeracy skills and parents’ education, attitudes and expectations. Parents of Greek (N = 100) and Canadian (N = 104) five‐year‐old children completed a survey about parents’ home practices, academic expectations and attitudes; their children were tested on two numeracy measures (i.e., KeyMath‐Revised Numeration and next number generation). Greek parents reported numeracy and literacy activities less frequently than Canadian parents; however, the frequency of home numeracy activities that involved direct experiences with numbers or mathematical content (e.g., learning simple sums, mental math) was related to children’s numeracy skills in both countries. For Greek children, home literacy experiences (i.e., storybook exposure) also predicted numeracy outcomes. The mediation model was supported for Greek children, but for Canadian children, the parent factors had both direct and mediated relations with home practices.     

The Role of Speaker Knowledge in Children's Pragmatic Inferences

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement “Some Xs Y” is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5‐year‐olds (N = 32) but not 4‐year‐olds (N = 32) reliably connected statements of different logical strength (e.g., “The girl colored all/some of the star”) to observers who were fully or partially informed. Four‐year‐olds’ performance improved when observer knowledge could be assessed more easily (Experiment 2a, N = 25) but remained the same in a nonlinguistic version of Experiment 1 that preserved the epistemic requirements of the original study (Experiment 2b, N = 26). These findings have implications for the development of early communicative abilities.     

Rates of meaningful change in the mental health of children in long-term out-of-home care: A seven- to nine-year prospective study

Children residing in long-term out-of-home care have high rates of clinical-level mental health difficulties. However, the stability of these children’s difficulties throughout their time in care is uncertain. This paper reports estimates of the seven- to nine-year stability of carer-reported scores on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Assessment Checklists for Children (ACC) and Adolescents (ACA) for 85 children in long-term foster or kinship care. Prospective score changes on the CBCL total problems and ACC-ACA shared-item scales were assigned to one of four change groups: ‘sustained mental health’; ‘meaningful improvement’; ‘no meaningful change’; and ‘meaningful deterioration’. On each of the two measures, more than 60% of children manifested either sustained mental health or meaningful improvement in their mental health, while less than a quarter showed meaningful deterioration. Mean mental health scores for the aggregate sample did not change over the 7–9 year period. Findings discount the presence of a uniform, population-wide effect—suggesting instead, that children’s mental health follows several distinct trajectories. Rather than asking whether long-term care is generally therapeutic or harmful for the development of previously maltreated children, future investigations should focus on the questions “…what are the systemic and interpersonal characteristics of care that promote and sustain children’s psychological development throughout childhood, and what characteristics are developmentally harmful?” and “…for which children is care therapeutic, and for which children is it not?”     

Trajectories of early childhood family instability and the development of externalizing behaviors from middle childhood to adolescence: A prospective study of at-risk families

This study examined associations between trajectories of family instability across early childhood and trajectories of externalizing behaviors from middle childhood to adolescence. Growth mixture models were fit to annual caregiver reports of instability from child ages 2–5 (N = 731; 49% girls, 50% White). A curve of factors model was fit to externalizing behaviors from child ages 7.5–14. Chronic, elevated instability across early childhood predicted elevated externalizing behaviors from middle childhood to adolescence. Data collection spanned from 2002 to 2017. Increasing or declining levels of instability predicted elevated externalizing behaviors in middle to late childhood, but not in adolescence. Caregiver depressive symptoms mediated the association between instability and the externalizing behavior intercept. Intervening on chronic instability may reduce child externalizing problems.     

Teacher depressive symptoms and children's school readiness in Ghana

This study investigated associations between kindergarten teachers' (N = 208) depressive symptoms and students' (Ghanaian nationals, N = 1490, M_age = 5.8) school-readiness skills (early literacy, early numeracy, social–emotional skills, and executive function) across 208 schools in Ghana over one school year. Teachers' depressive symptoms in the fall negatively predicted students' overall school-readiness skills in the spring, controlling for school-readiness skills in the fall. These results were primarily driven by social–emotional skills (r = .1–.3). There was evidence of heterogeneity by students' fall skill levels; teacher depressive symptoms predicted more negative spring overall school readiness for children who had higher fall school-readiness skills. Findings underscore the importance of teachers' mental health in early childhood education globally, with implications for policy and practice.     

Numeracy‐related exchanges in joint storybook reading and play

Studies of the processes by which parents encourage early numerical development in the context of parent–child interactions during routine, culturally relevant activities at home are scarce. The present study was designed to investigate spontaneous exchanges related to numeracy during parent–child interactions in reading and play activities at home. Thirty‐seven families with a four‐year‐old child (13 low‐income) were observed. Two types of numeracy interactions were of interest: socio‐cultural numeracy exchanges, explaining the use and value of money or numbers in routine activities such as shopping or cooking, and mathematical exchanges, including counting, quantity or size comparisons. Results indicated that high‐income parents engaged in more mathematical exchanges during both reading and play than did low‐income parents, though there were no differences in the initiation of socio‐cultural numeracy exchanges. The focus of parental guidance related to numeracy was conceptual and embedded in the activity context, with few dyads focusing on counting or numbers per se. The findings suggest the importance of parent education efforts that incorporate numeracy‐related discourse in the context of daily routines to augment young children’s numeracy development.     

Gender-specific trajectories of academic achievement in Chinese elementary school students: Relations with life satisfaction trajectories and suicidal ideation trajectories

This study explored heterogeneous developmental trajectories of academic achievement and their relations to trajectories of life satisfaction and trajectories of suicidal ideation among Chinese elementary school students. A sample of 547 students (55.0% boys; M_age = 9.00 years, SD = 0.76 at Time 1) completed a packet of measures on five occasions across two years, using 6-month intervals. Three distinct trajectories of academic achievement were identified: “high-stable” (86.28%), “low-increasing” (8.94%), and “low-decreasing” (4.78%). Girls demonstrated higher academic achievement than boys. Students displaying adverse developmental trends in academic achievement were more likely to show adverse trends in life satisfaction. Finally, trajectories of academic achievement and trajectories of suicidal ideation were related for girls, but not boys. Programs promoting academic achievement may require adaptations for the differing genders and start as early as elementary school.     

Why Are Children So Distractible? Development of Attention and Motor Control From Childhood to Adulthood

Distractibility is the propensity to behaviorally react to irrelevant information. Although children are more distractible the younger they are, the precise contribution of attentional and motor components to distractibility and their developmental trajectories have not been characterized yet. We used a new behavioral paradigm to identify the developmental dynamics of components contributing to distractibility in a large cohort of French participants balanced, between age groups, in gender and socioeconomic status (N = 352; age: 6–25). Results reveal that each measure of these components, namely voluntary attention, distraction, impulsivity, and motor control, present a distinct maturational timeline. In young children, increased distractibility is mostly the result of reduced sustained attention capacities and enhanced distraction, whereas in teenagers, it is the result of decreased motor control and increased impulsivity.     

Using saliency maps to separate competing processes in infant visual cognition

This article presents an eye‐tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and “area‐of‐interest” analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12‐month‐olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high‐saliency image regions to looking at more informative, highly variable object parts. In contrast, 4‐month‐olds (N = 27) exhibited a different pattern displaying a similar decreasing impact of saliency accompanied by a steady focus on the object’s center, indicating that targeted feature extraction during category learning develops across the 1st year of life. These results illustrate how the effects of lower and higher level processes may be disentangled using a combined saliency map and area‐of‐interest analysis.     

Children's Norm Enforcement in Their Interactions With Peers

This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three‐year‐olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms (“It works like this” rather than “You must do it like this”). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years.     

A Developmental Model of Reading Acquisition Based upon Early Scaffolding Errors and Subsequent Vowel Inferences

This paper investigates the processes that predict reading acquisition. Associations between (a) scaffolding errors (e.g., “torn” misread as “town” or “tarn”), other reading errors, and later reading and (b) vowel and rime inferences and later reading were explored. To assess both of these issues, 50 6‐year‐old children were shown a number of CVC words, and word reading errors were noted. Children were then taught families of riming words that could serve as a basis for rime or vowel analogies (e.g., “bark”, “mark”, “dark” → “park” or “harm”) before attempting to read the CVCs a second time. Children’s reading ability was measured at age 6 and two years later at age 8. The results showed that, among word reading error groups, only scaffolding errors at age 6 were unique predictors of reading at age 8, after reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness were controlled. Vowel but not rime inferences predicted reading at age 8. The results are used to inform a model of the role of phoneme awareness and grapheme use in early reading development wherein vowel inference‐use helps to specify precise representations of CVC words from preliminary scaffolding errors.