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Cortical tracking of visual rhythmic speech by 5‐ and 8‐month‐old infants: Individual differences in phase angle relate to language outcomes up to 2 years Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Áine Ní Choisdealbha, Adam Attaheri, Sinead Rocha, Natasha Mead, Helen Olawole‐Scott, Maria Alfaro e Oliveira, Carmel Brough, Perrine Brusini, Samuel Gibbon, Panagiotis Boutris, Christina Grey, Isabel Williams, Sheila Flanagan, Usha Goswami
It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low‐frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low‐frequency visual temporal information (‘visual prosody’) is known from behavioural
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Precursors to infant sensorimotor synchronization to speech and non‐speech rhythms: A longitudinal study Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sinead Rocha, Adam Attaheri, Áine Ní Choisdealbha, Perrine Brusini, Natasha Mead, Helen Olawole‐Scott, Panagiotis Boutris, Samuel Gibbon, Isabel Williams, Christina Grey, Maria Alfaro e Oliveira, Carmel Brough, Sheila Flanagan, Henna Ahmed, Emma Macrae, Usha Goswami
Impaired sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) to acoustic rhythm may be a marker of atypical language development. Here, Motion Capture was used to assess gross motor rhythmic movement at six time points between 5‐ and 11 months of age. Infants were recorded drumming to acoustic stimuli of varying linguistic and temporal complexity: drumbeats, repeated syllables and nursery rhymes. Here we show, for
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Daily dynamics of feeling loved by parents and their prospective implications for adolescent flourishing Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Mengya Xia, John K. Coffey, Gregory M. Fosco
Feeling loved by one's caregiver is essential for individual flourishing (i.e., high levels of psychological well‐being in multiple dimensions). Although similar constructs are found to benefit adolescent well‐being, research that directly tests parental love as a feeling from the recipient's perspective is rare. Historically, parental love has been measured using single‐assessment methods and assumed
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Infant vocal productions coincide with body movements Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Jeremy I. Borjon, Drew H. Abney, Chen Yu, Linda B. Smith
Producing recognizable words is a difficult motor task; a one‐syllable word can require the coordination of over 80 muscles. Thus, it is not surprising that the development of word productions in infancy lags considerably behind receptive language and is a known limiting factor in language development. A large literature has focused on the vocal apparatus, its articulators, and language development
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“Catastrophic” set size limits on infants’ capacity to represent objects: A systematic review and Bayesian meta‐analysis Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Jinjing (Jenny) Wang, Melissa M. Kibbe
Decades of research has revealed that humans can concurrently represent small quantities of three‐dimensional objects as those objects move through space or into occlusion. For infants (but not older children or adults), this ability apparently comes with a significant limitation: when the number of occluded objects exceeds three, infants experience what has been characterized as a “catastrophic” set
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Long‐term abacus training gains in children are predicted by medial temporal lobe anatomy and circuitry Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Ye Xie, Hyesang Chang, Yi Zhang, Chunjie Wang, Yuan Zhang, Lang Chen, Fengji Geng, Yixuan Ku, Vinod Menon, Feiyan Chen
Abacus‐based mental calculation (AMC) is a widely used educational tool for enhancing math learning, offering an accessible and cost‐effective method for classroom implementation. Despite its universal appeal, the neurocognitive mechanisms that drive the efficacy of AMC training remain poorly understood. Notably, although abacus training relies heavily on the rapid recall of number positions and sequences
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Mother of all bonds: Influences on spatial association across the lifespan in capuchins Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Irene Godoy, Peter Korsten, Susan E. Perry
In humans, being more socially integrated is associated with better physical and mental health and/or with lower mortality. This link between sociality and health may have ancient roots: sociality also predicts survival or reproduction in other mammals, such as rats, dolphins, and non‐human primates. A key question, therefore, is which factors influence the degree of sociality over the life course
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Hebbian learning can explain rhythmic neural entrainment to statistical regularities Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Ansgar D. Endress
In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how predictive syllables (or other items) are of one another
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To risk or not: The impact of socioeconomic status on preschoolers’ risky decision-making for gains and losses Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Delhii Hoid, Ziyan Guo, Zhibin He, Junhui Wu, Zhen Wu
Disparities in socioeconomic status (SES) may affect individuals’ risk preferences, which have important developmental consequences across the lifespan. Yet, previous research has shown inconsistent associations between SES and risky decision-making, and little is known about how this link develops from a young age. The current research is among the first to examine how SES influences preschoolers’
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The development of visual cognition: The emergence of spatial congruency bias Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Mengcun Gao, Maurryce D. Starks, Julie D. Golomb, Vladimir M. Sloutsky
In adults, spatial location plays a special role in visual object processing. People are more likely to judge two sequentially presented objects as being identical when they appear in the same location compared to in different locations (a phenomenon referred to as Spatial Congruency Bias [SCB]). However, no comparable Identity Congruency Bias (ICB) is found, suggesting an asymmetric location-identity
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Exposure to sign language prior and after cochlear implantation increases language and cognitive skills in deaf children Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 A. Delcenserie, F. Genesee, F. Champoux
Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input and whether these benefits also extend to memory abilities
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Toddlers do not preferentially transmit generalizable information to others Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Didar Karadağ, Marina Bazhydai, Gert Westermann
Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four- to 7-year-old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching-like contexts. Although 2-year-old children are able to distinguish between generalizable and non-generalizable information, it is not known whether they likewise transmit generalizable
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Cognitive deficits and enhancements in youth from adverse conditions: An integrative assessment using Drift Diffusion Modeling in the ABCD study Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Stefan Vermeent, Ethan S. Young, Meriah L. DeJoseph, Anna-Lena Schubert, Willem E. Frankenhuis
Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive processing. Second, most studies either isolate or
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Direct and indirect effects of mother's spatial ability on child's spatial ability: What role does the home environment play? Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Nelcida L. Garcia-Sanchez, Anthony Steven Dick, Timothy Hayes, Shannon M. Pruden
Individual differences in spatial thinking are predictive of children's math and science achievement and later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Little is known about whether parent characteristics predict individual differences in children's spatial thinking. This study aims to understand whether, and to what extent, mother's intrinsic (i.e., mental rotation)
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How pervasive is joint attention? Mother-child dyads from a Wichi community reveal a different form of “togetherness” Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Andrea Taverna, Migdalia Padilla, Sandra Waxman
Theories of early development have emphasized the power of caregivers as active agents in infant socialization and learning. However, there is variability, across communities, in the tendency of caregivers to engage with their infants directly. This raises the possibility that infants and children in some communities spend more time engaged in solitary activities than in dyadic or triadic interactions
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Sustained pacifier use is associated with smaller vocabulary sizes at 1 and 2 years of age: A cross-sectional study Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Luis E. Muñoz, Natalia Kartushina, Julien Mayor
Pacifier use during childhood has been hypothesized to interfere with language processing, but, to date, there is limited evidence revealing detrimental effects of prolonged pacifier use on infant vocabulary learning. In the present study, parents of 12- and 24-month-old infants were recruited in Oslo (Norway). The sample included 1187 monolingual full-term born (without visual, auditory, or cognitive
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The role of vision in the acquisition of words: Vocabulary development in blind toddlers Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Erin Campbell, Robyn Casillas, Elika Bergelson
What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7–57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N = 6574). We found that on average, blind children showed a
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The role of translation equivalents in bilingual word learning Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Alvin W. M. Tan, Virginia A. Marchman, Michael C. Frank
Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)—words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual children. Prior studies of TE learning have often been confounded
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The personal epistemology of parents predicts the development of scientific reasoning in children aged 6–10 years Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Christopher Osterhaus, Susanne Koerber
The influence of the epistemological beliefs of parents on the development of comprehensive scientific reasoning abilities was investigated in a five-wave longitudinal study from kindergarten to elementary school. The 161 German 5–10-year-olds (89 girls, 72 boys) were assessed yearly on their scientific reasoning abilities using comprehensive measures for experimentation and data-interpretation skills
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Act generously when others do so: Majority influence on young children's sharing behavior Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Qiao Chai, Jun Yin, Mowei Shen, Jie He
Children's sharing behavior is profoundly shaped by social norms within their society, and they can learn these norms by directly observing how most others share in their immediate environment. Here we systematically investigated the impact of majority influence on the sharing behavior of young Chinese children through three studies (N = 336, 168 girls). Four- and 6-year-olds were allowed to choose
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Digital rhythm training improves reading fluency in children Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Theodore P. Zanto, Anastasia Giannakopoulou, Courtney L. Gallen, Avery E. Ostrand, Jessica W. Younger, Roger Anguera-Singla, Joaquin A. Anguera, Adam Gazzaley
Musical instrument training has been linked to improved academic and cognitive abilities in children, but it remains unclear why this occurs. Moreover, access to instrument training is not always feasible, thereby leaving less fortunate children without opportunity to benefit from such training. Although music-based video games may be more accessible to a broader population, research is lacking regarding
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Individual differences in processing speed and curiosity explain infant habituation and dishabituation performance Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Francesco Poli, Tommaso Ghilardi, Roseriet Beijers, Carolina de Weerth, Max Hinne, Rogier B. Mars, Sabine Hunnius
Habituation and dishabituation are the most prevalent measures of infant cognitive functioning, and they have reliably been shown to predict later cognitive outcomes. Yet, the exact mechanisms underlying infant habituation and dishabituation are still unclear. To investigate them, we tested 106 8-month-old infants on a classic habituation task and a novel visual learning task. We used a hierarchical
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Postpartum romantic attachment and constructiveness: The protective effects of a conflict communication intervention for parents’ relationship functioning over one year Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-25 Samantha A. Murray-Perdue, Amanda L. Nowak, Molly J. O'Neill, Lijuan Wang, E. Mark Cummings, Julia M. Braungart-Rieker
Parent relationship functioning has a well-documented influence on children's early socioemotional development as early as infancy. Postpartum parenting is also a critically vulnerable period for relationships and often results in relationship decline. We investigated the effects of a rigorous, psycho-educational conflict communication intervention for supporting parents’ relationship functioning in
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Uncomfortable staring? Gaze to other people in social situations is inhibited in both infants and adults Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Louisa Kulke, Sahura Ertugrul, Emely Reyentanz, Vanessa Thomas
People attract infants’ and adults’ gaze when presented on a computer screen. However, in live social situations, adults inhibit their gaze at strangers to avoid sending inappropriate social signals. Such inhibition of gaze has never been directly investigated in infants. The current preregistered study measured gaze and neural responses (EEG alpha power) to a confederate in a live social situation
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Strategic social decision making undergoes significant changes in typically developing and autistic early adolescents Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Wenda Liu, Nikita Shah, Ili Ma, Gabriela Rosenblau
Information sampling about others’ trustworthiness prior to cooperation allows humans to minimize the risk of exploitation. Here, we examined whether early adolescence or preadolescence, a stage defined as in between childhood and adolescence, is a significant developmental period for strategic social decisions. We also sought to characterize differences between autistic children and their typically
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The impact of sufferers’ wealth status on pain perceptions: Its development and relation to allocation of healthcare resources Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Yuhang Shu, Huisi (Jessica) Li, Shaocong Ma, Lin Bian
Wealth-based disparities in health care wherein the poor receive undertreatment in painful conditions are a prominent issue that requires immediate attention. Research with adults suggests that these disparities are partly rooted in stereotypes associating poor individuals with pain insensitivity. However, whether and how children consider a sufferer's wealth status in their pain perceptions remains
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Context-dependent approach and avoidance behavioral profiles as predictors of psychopathology Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Caroline M. Kelsey, Anna Fasman, Kelsey Quigley, Kelli Dickerson, Michelle Bosquet Enlow, Charles A. Nelson
Inhibition (a temperamental profile characterized by elevated levels of avoidance behaviors) is associated with increased likelihood for developing anxiety and depression, whereas exuberance (a temperamental profile characterized by elevated levels of approach behaviors) is associated with increased likelihood for developing externalizing conditions (e.g., attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and
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Longitudinal associations between lie evaluations and frequency: The moderating role of age Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Victoria W. Dykstra, Teena Willoughby, Angela D. Evans
While previous studies have demonstrated correlations between children and adolescents’ evaluations of lies and lie-telling behaviors, the temporal order of these associations over time and changes across this developmental period remain unexamined. The current study examined longitudinal associations among children and adolescents’ (N = 1128; Mage = 11.54, SD = 1.68, 49.80% male, and 83.6% white)
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Don't throw the associative baby out with the Bayesian bathwater: Children are more associative when reasoning retrospectively under information processing demands Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Deon T. Benton, David Kamper, Rebecca M. Beaton, David M. Sobel
Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability that enables individuals to learn about the complex interactions in the world around them. However, the mechanisms that underpin causal reasoning are not well understood. For example, it remains unresolved whether children's causal inferences are best explained by Bayesian inference or associative learning. The two experiments and computational models
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Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Rista C. Plate, Tralucia Powell, Rachael Bedford, Tim J. Smith, Ankur Bamezai, Quentin Wedderburn, Alexis Broussard, Natasha Soesanto, Caroline Swetlitz, Rebecca Waller, Nicholas J. Wagner
Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non-threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved
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What is in an action? Preschool children predict that agents take previous paths and not previous goals Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Gökhan Gönül, Marina Kammermeier, Markus Paulus
Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others’ actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore inconclusive. The current study advanced this debate by assessing
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The development of tone discrimination in infancy: Evidence from a cross-linguistic, multi-lab report Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Marina Kalashnikova, Leher Singh, Angeline Tsui, Eylem Altuntas, Denis Burnham, Ryan Cannistraci, Ng Bee Chin, Ye Feng, Laura Fernández-Merino, Antonia Götz, Lisa Gustavsson, Jessica Hay, Barbara Höhle, René Kager, Regine Lai, Liquan Liu, Ellen Marklund, Thierry Nazzi, Daniela Santos Oliveira, Anne Marte Haug Olstad, Anthony Picaud, Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Feng-Ming Tsao, Patrick C. M. Wong, Pei Jun
We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants’ ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental for comprehensive theories of language learning. While
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Children with dyslexia show no deficit in exogenous spatial attention but show differences in visual encoding Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Mahalakshmi Ramamurthy, Alex L. White, Jason D. Yeatman
In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term “attention” has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand “attention.” Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task performance. Nonetheless, an emerging view is that children with dyslexia
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The slow emergence of gaze- and point-following: A longitudinal study of infants from 4 to 12 months Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Yueyan Tang, Marybel Robledo Gonzalez, Gedeon O. Deák
Acquisition of visual attention-following skills, notably gaze- and point-following, contributes to infants' ability to share attention with caregivers, which in turn contributes to social learning and communication. However, the development of gaze- and point-following in the first 18 months remains controversial, in part because of different testing protocols and standards. To address this, we longitudinally
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Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-11-05 Brandon M. Woo, Shari Liu, Elizabeth S. Spelke
Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants’ first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others’ actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not see others’ reaches as goal-directed. In five experiments
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Alteration of body representation in typical and atypical motor development Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-11-05 Thomas Gauduel, Camille Blondet, Sibylle Gonzalez-Monge, James Bonaiuto, Alice Gomez
Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) impacts the quality of life and ability to perform coordinated actions in 5% of school-aged children. The quality of body representations of individuals with DCD has been questioned, but never assessed. We hypothesize that children with DCD have imprecise body representations in the sensory and motor domains. Twenty neurotypical children, seventeen children
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Sleep and circadian rhythms during pregnancy, social disadvantage, and alterations in brain development in neonates Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Caroline P. Hoyniak, Diana J. Whalen, Joan L. Luby, Deanna M. Barch, J. Philip Miller, Peinan Zhao, Regina L. Triplett, Yo-El Ju, Christopher D. Smyser, Barbara Warner, Cynthia E. Rogers, Erik D. Herzog, Sarah K. England
Pregnant women in poverty may be especially likely to experience sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances, which may have downstream effects on fetal neurodevelopment. However, the associations between sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances, social disadvantage during pregnancy, and neonatal brain structure remains poorly understood. The current study explored the association between maternal sleep
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Parental socioeconomic status weakly predicts specific cognitive and academic skills beyond general cognitive ability Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Giacomo Bignardi, Silvana Mareva, Duncan E. Astle
Parental socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-established predictor of children's neurocognitive development. Several theories propose that specific cognitive skills are particularly vulnerable. However, this can be challenging to test, because cognitive assessments are not pure measures of distinct neurocognitive processes, and scores across different tests are often highly correlated. Aside from
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“Shape bias” goes social: Children categorize people by weight rather than race Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Rebecca Peretz-Lange, Melissa M. Kibbe
Children tend to categorize novel objects according to their shape rather than their color, texture, or other salient properties—known as “shape bias.” We investigated whether this bias also extends to the social domain, where it should lead children to categorize people according to their weight (their body shape) rather than their race (their skin color). In Study 1, participants (n = 50 US 4- and
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Eye movements reveal that young school children shift attention when solving additions and subtractions Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Nicolas Masson, Valérie Dormal, Martine Stephany, Christine Schiltz
Adults shift their attention to the right or to the left along a spatial continuum when solving additions and subtractions, respectively. Studies suggest that these shifts not only support the exact computation of the results but also anticipatively narrow down the range of plausible answers when processing the operands. However, little is known on when and how these attentional shifts arise in childhood
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Walking and falling: Using robot simulations to model the role of errors in infant walking Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Ori Ossmy, Danyang Han, Patrick MacAlpine, Justine Hoch, Peter Stone, Karen E. Adolph
What is the optimal penalty for errors in infant skill learning? Behavioral analyses indicate that errors are frequent but trivial as infants acquire foundational skills. In learning to walk, for example, falling is commonplace but appears to incur only a negligible penalty. Behavioral data, however, cannot reveal whether a low penalty for falling is beneficial for learning to walk. Here, we used a
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Statistical learning and children's emergent literacy in rural Côte d'Ivoire Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-24 Benjamin D. Zinszer, Joelle Hannon, Anqi Hu, Aya Élise Kouadio, Hermann Akpé, Fabrice Tanoh, Madeleine Wang, Zhenghan Qi, Kaja Jasińska
Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, children enter fifth
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Letters away from the looking glass: Developmental trajectory of mirrored and rotated letter processing within words Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Tânia Fernandes, Sofia Velasco, Isabel Leite
Discrimination of reversible mirrored letters (e.g., d and b) poses a challenge when learning to read as it requires overcoming mirror invariance, an evolutionary-old perceptual tendency of processing mirror images as equivalent. The present study investigated when, in reading development, mirror-image discrimination becomes automatic during visual word recognition. The developmental trajectory of
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Emotion regulation as a complex system: A multi-contextual and multi- level approach to understanding emotion expression and cortisol reactivity among Chinese and US preschoolers Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Ka I Ip, Alison L. Miller, Li Wang, Barbara Felt, Sheryl L. Olson, Twila Tardif
Are children from “Eastern” cultures less emotionally expressive and reactive than children from “Western” cultures? To answer this, we used a multi-level and multi-contextual approach to understand variations in emotion displays and cortisol reactivity among preschoolers living in China and the United States. One hundred two preschoolers from China (N = 58; 55% males) and the United States (N = 44
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Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults’ racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Analia F. Albuja, Mercedes Muñoz, Katherine Kinzler, Amanda Woodward, Sarah E. Gaither
Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization—the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless
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Neurocognitive mechanisms of co-occurring math difficulties in dyslexia: Differences in executive function and visuospatial processing Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Rebecca A. Marks, Courtney Pollack, Steven L. Meisler, Anila M. D'Mello, Tracy M. Centanni, Rachel R. Romeo, Karolina Wade, Anna A. Matejko, Daniel Ansari, John D. E. Gabrieli, Joanna A. Christodoulou
Children with dyslexia frequently also struggle with math. However, studies of reading disability (RD) rarely assess math skill, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying co-occurring reading and math disability (RD+MD) are not clear. The current study aimed to identify behavioral and neurocognitive factors associated with co-occurring MD among 86 children with RD. Within this sample, 43% had co-occurring
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The role of systematicity in early referent selection Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Ming Yean Sia, Emily Mather, Matthew W. Crocker, Nivedita Mani
Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects of the same semantic category (e.g., both are animals)
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Controlling the input: How one-year-old infants sustain visual attention Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Andres H. Mendez, Chen Yu, Linda B. Smith
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Examining infants’ visual paired comparison performance in the US and rural Malawi Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Aaron G. Beckner, Charles D. Arnold, Megan G. Bragg, Bess L. Caswell, Zhijun Chen, Katherine Cox, Michaela C. DeBolt, Matthews George, Kenneth Maleta, Christine Stewart, Lisa M. Oakes, Elizabeth Prado
Measures of attention and memory were evaluated in 6- to 9-month-old infants from two diverse contexts. One sample consisted of African infants residing in rural Malawi (N = 228, 118 girls, 110 boys). The other sample consisted of racially diverse infants residing in suburban California (N = 48, 24 girls, 24 boys). Infants were tested in an eye-tracking version of the visual paired comparison procedure
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Perceived contact with friends from lower socioeconomic status reduces exclusion based on social class Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-26 Buse Gönül, Basak Sahin-Acar, Melanie Killen
This study investigated children's and adolescents’ reasoning about intergroup exclusion based on social class from educational opportunities in Türkiye. The role of children's and adolescents’ perceived contact with friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds on their evaluations of exclusion and personal solutions to the exclusion was also examined. Participants (N = 270) included 142 children
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Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant-directed speech Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Caroline Beech, Daniel Swingley
Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced
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Four- and six-year-old children track a single meaning with both familiar and unfamiliar referents when the referent is clear: More evidence for propose-but-verify Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Felix Hao Wang, Meili Luo, Nan Li
In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from “in the moment” that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals versus drawings of non-existent novel objects as potential referents
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Asynchronous development of memory integration and differentiation influences temporal memory organization Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Christine Coughlin, Athula Pudhiyidath, Hannah E. Roome, Nicole L. Varga, Kim V. Nguyen, Alison R. Preston
Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within-event integration and between-event differentiation processes that organize events according to their contextual similarities and differences, respectively
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Does the speaker's eye gaze facilitate infants’ word segmentation from continuous speech? An ERP study Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Melis Çetinçelik, Caroline F. Rowland, Tineke M. Snijders
The environment in which infants learn language is multimodal and rich with social cues. Yet, the effects of such cues, such as eye contact, on early speech perception have not been closely examined. This study assessed the role of ostensive speech, signalled through the speaker's eye gaze direction, on infants’ word segmentation abilities. A familiarisation-then-test paradigm was used while electroencephalography
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Music, a piece of many puzzles in developmental science. Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Samuel A Mehr,Heather Bortfeld
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Progress in elementary school reading linked to growth of cortical responses to familiar letter combinations within visual word forms Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Fang Wang, Blair Kaneshiro, Elizabeth Y. Toomarian, Radhika S. Gosavi, Lindsey R. Hasak, Suanna Moron, Quynh Trang H. Nguyen, Anthony M. Norcia, Bruce D. McCandliss
Learning to read depends on the ability to extract precise details of letter combinations, which convey critical information that distinguishes tens of thousands of visual word forms. To support fluent reading skill, one crucial neural developmental process is one's brain sensitivity to statistical constraints inherent in combining letters into visual word forms. To test this idea in early readers
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Quantifying quality: The impact of measures of school quality on children's academic achievement across diverse societies Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-16 Bruce S. Rawlings, Helen Elizabeth Davis, Adote Anum, Oskar Burger, Lydia Chen, Juliet Carolina Castro Morales, Natalia Dutra, Ardain Dzabatou, Vivian Dzokoto, Alejandro Erut, Frankie T. K. Fong, Sabrina Ghelardi, Micah Goldwater, Gordon Ingram, Emily Messer, Jessica Kingsford, Sheina Lew-Levy, Kimberley Mendez, Morgan Newhouse, Mark Nielsen, Gairan Pamei, Sarah Pope-Caldwell, Karlos Ramos, Luis Emilio
Recent decades have seen a rapid acceleration in global participation in formal education, due to worldwide initiatives aimed to provide school access to all children. Research in high income countries has shown that school quality indicators have a significant, positive impact on numeracy and literacy—skills required to participate in the increasingly globalized economy. Schools vary enormously in
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Children dynamically update and extend the interface between number words and perceptual magnitudes Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Denitza Dramkin, Darko Odic
As adults, we represent and think about number, space, and time in at least two ways: our intuitive—but imprecise—perceptual representations, and the slowly learned—but precise—number words. With development, these representational formats interface, allowing us to use precise number words to estimate imprecise perceptual experiences. We test two accounts of this developmental milestone. Either slowly
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Contrasting one's share of the shared life space: Comparing the roles of metacognition and inhibitory control in the development of theory of mind among Scottish and Japanese children Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Mariel Symeonidou, Ai Mizokawa, Shinsuke Kabaya, Martin J. Doherty, Josephine Ross
Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western samples. In independent cultures, an emphasis on one's
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Assessing the impact of LEGO® construction training on spatial and mathematical skills Dev. Sci. (IF 4.939) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Emily McDougal, Priya Silverstein, Oscar Treleaven, Lewis Jerrom, Katie Gilligan-Lee, Camilla Gilmore, Emily K. Farran
Lego construction ability is associated with a variety of spatial skills and mathematical outcomes. However, it is unknown whether these relations are causal. We aimed to establish the causal impact of Lego construction training on: Lego construction ability; a broad range of spatial skills; and on mathematical outcomes in 7–9-year-olds. We also aimed to identify how this causal impact differs for