Semantic verbal fluency performance depends on both lexico-semantic and executive control processes that are found to support word search and retrieval. Previous research has examined the development of these processes by reporting on two strategic indices, clustering and switching (C&S), focusing on their individual contributions to fluency performance. However, little is known about how these processes are coordinated within individuals during word retrieval. This study adopted a person-centered approach to address this gap and explore whether C&S configurations are developmentally and functionally meaningful. The sample consisted of 422 typically developing monolingual Greek-speaking children, aged 4;0 to 16;11 years. Using latent profile analysis based on two clustering and two switching indicators derived from an "animal" semantic fluency task, we identified four major latent profiles reflecting distinct configurations of retrieval strategies: an Emerging strategic profile characterized by limited use of both clustering and switching, Cluster-dominant and Switch-dominant profiles emphasizing one process over the other, and an Integrated profile characterized by high levels of both clustering and switching. Profile membership was systematically associated with age. Profiles also differed significantly in fluency performance and these differences remained robust after controlling for age. Notably, the ability to integrate both strategic processes within the retrieval stream was associated with improved fluency performance beyond age. Finally, profile membership explained unique variance in productivity beyond that accounted for by age and the independent C&S indicators. Together, these findings reveal that how C&S are configured within children constitutes an important source of individual differences in semantic verbal fluency development.
Children's spatial skills are linked to their later achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), making this a critical area of research in cognitive and developmental science. Here, we examined whether a common measure of spatial skills should be treated as a single construct (i.e. broad spatial assembly skills) or as representing two unique constructs, 2-dimensional (2D, like arranging pieces on a flat surface) and 3-dimensional (3D, like building a block tower) spatial assembly skills, using a three-pronged approach. With a sample of 548 preschool-aged children (M = 4.32 years, SD = 0.59 years; 50% female) from three interventions in the United States, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the measure, compared children's performance by trial type, and investigated relations between spatial skills and other cognitive skills. Results showed that the measure is more accurately captured by a two-factor structure that, respectively, represents the constructs of 2D and 3D spatial assembly skills. Further, children perform better on 2D spatial assembly trials than 3D trials. When controlling for performance on the other trial type, children's 2D and 3D spatial assembly performance are also uniquely related to other cognitive skills. Specifically, performance on 2D trials was uniquely related to numeracy whereas performance on 3D spatial assembly trials was uniquely related to executive function, numeracy, geometry, and math language skills. These findings suggest that 2D and 3D spatial assembly skills are unique constructs, advancing research on spatial skill development and providing guidance for measuring children's spatial skills.
The present study explored maternal use of relational language with their 3-year-olds, comparing first-generation Chinese immigrant and European-American middle-class families in California, USA. Thirty-six mother-child dyads (17 girls, 19 boys) participated in three joint activities (i.e. 3-D puzzle, sorting activity, book reading). Maternal use of three types of relational language was coded: structural relation, object similarity, and self-association. Across the two groups, mothers adapted their language use based on activity context: Structural relation talk was most frequent during puzzle and sorting tasks, whereas self-association was more common during book reading. Crucially, cross-cultural differences were observed: Chinese immigrant mothers used a significantly higher proportion of structural relation language than European-American mothers, particularly during tasks requiring spatial organization. The finding provided initial evidence for culturally distinct practices of relational-language use and underscored the role of activity contexts in studying relational reasoning.
Past research has documented differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in the Theory of Mind (ToM) battery. Early research into this variation has shown that children from "Western" cultures pass the Diverse Desire (DD), and the Diverse Belief (DB) tasks before the Knowledge Access (KA) task, whereas children from "Eastern" cultures show the reverse pattern (DD>KA>DB). The variance in sequence has been attributed to the collectivism of "Eastern" cultures and the individualism of "Western" cultures. The current study focuses on a cultural group, Turkish children, for which intra-cultural sequence variability has been well-documented (i.e. (1) DD>DB>KA; (2) DD>KA>DB; (3) KA>DD>DB). Given this intra-cultural variability, the current study investigated the possible effects of both general social-contextual variables (socioeconomic status, number of siblings) and child-targeted social-contextual variables (parenting attitudes) while controlling for executive functions. One hundred and twenty preschoolers (M = 52.46, SD = 9.72) and their parents (104 mothers, 14 fathers) from T & uuml;rkiye participated in the study. Results indicated that preschoolers whose mothers had more permissive attitudes were more likely to conform to the "Western" sequence and more overprotective attitudes predicted children's adherence to the "KA-first" sequence. Contrary to expectations, there were no effects of authoritative or authoritarian attitudes on sequencing or total ToM performance. These findings suggest that there is utility in reconsidering the collectivism-individualism (and consequently "Eastern" vs. "Western") contrast to explain ToM sequence variability by including contextual and culturally significant variables (e.g. permissive, overprotective parenting attitudes).
Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to carry out intended actions at a future point in time. Despite extensive research on the cognitive underpinnings of PM, the role of environmental factors, such as parent-child interaction through scaffolding, remains largely unexplored. The present study examined the relations between parental PM performance, parental scaffolding, and 8- to 10-year-old children's PM performance. A total of 42 German parent-child dyads participated in the study and completed the Virtual Week task as a measure of laboratory-based PM. Virtual Week comprises regular (repeating) and irregular (one-off) PM tasks. Further, parents completed questionnaires assessing their scaffolding behavior, their own everyday PM, and their perception of their children's everyday PM, while children provided self-ratings of their everyday PM performance. Parents' performance on regular PM tasks predicted children's laboratory-based PM, but parental metacognition did not. In addition, parents' scaffolding behavior was positively associated with children's performance on regular PM tasks, suggesting that more active scaffolding supports the development of children's everyday prospective remembering. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of social and environmental factors in shaping children's PM development and point to potential avenues for future research and intervention targeting parent-child interactions.
Do young children use intentionality to place event boundaries? In Experiment 1, 4-5-year-old children and adults in the U.S. learned about an agent's goal (e.g. "Jessie wants to eat an orange with her breakfast to make it healthier"), saw an image of a partly complete outcome (e.g. a partly peeled orange) and were asked whether an event had occurred ("Did she peel the orange?"). Adults, but not children, were more likely to respond positively if the outcome satisfied the agent's goal. In Experiment 2, 4-5-year-old children and adults in the U.S. watched videos of two people in a social interaction. Both groups were more likely to accept that one character completed an event for the other, even if the visual outcome was incomplete, if the beneficiary's goal had been satisfied. These results support theories of event cognition that integrate multiple sources of information to explain how events are represented by both young and more mature minds.
Parent-child reminiscing is an important context for the development of autobiographical memory skills. In two studies, we explored links between mothers' interpretive framing of past shared emotional events during reminiscing and children's independent attempts to interpret and remember their experiences. In both studies, 3- to 6-year-old children and their mothers, all residents of the southeastern United States, reminisced about earlier events. Later, children participated in a scripted event during which they experienced a series of ambiguous social interactions that could be interpreted in either a negative or positive/neutral manner. Separately, mothers performed a task that assessed their own tendencies when interpreting and remembering ambiguity. In both studies, mothers who more often referenced negative emotions and made negative evaluations when guiding talk about the past with their children had children who were more likely to interpret and remember the ambiguous aspects of the staged event negatively. In addition, mothers who focused more on the negative when reminiscing with their children were especially prone to emphasize negativity in their own attempts to interpret and remember experiences. In contrast, mothers who frequently reflected on the ways that their children worked to regulate negative emotion had children who were more likely to remember ambiguity during the staged event in a neutral or even positive fashion. These findings suggest that mothers who have a general negative interpretation framework may teach their children through the reminiscing context to interpret and remember ambiguity during their own experiences negatively - biases that are risk factors for developing mood disorders.
Children's emotion regulation (ER) is associated with positive cognitive and psychological outcomes, yet little is known about whether and which aspects of early experiences foster its development. This study examined the longitudinal association between caregivers' elaboration during jointly constructed narratives with their children about past and future events and children's ER in socially challenging situations, as well as the role of theory of mind (ToM) in this association. Thirty-six Chinese caregivers and their preschool-aged children (23 girls) participated at two time points, 1 year apart (Mage at T1 = 53.63 months). At T1 and T2, caregivers engaged in a narrative task discussing both past and future events with their child. Caregivers' utterances were classified into two elaboration categories: elaborative questions, which elicited children's responses to contribute new information to an event, and elaborative statements, which provided new information about an event to children. At T2, children's ER was assessed using the Challenging Situations Task and their ToM was also measured. Findings showed that caregivers' elaborative statements during narratives at T1 predicted children's competent responses to challenging social situations 1 year later at T2, indicating stronger ER. At T2, caregivers' elaboration was not concurrently associated with children's ER. Children's ToM was significantly related to their ER, and preliminary evidence suggests that ToM might mediate the positive association between caregivers' elaborative statements and children's ER. Findings highlight the important role that caregiver-child interactions play in supporting socioemotional development and their implications for understanding the underlying mechanisms.
African children's language learning is understudied. In two studies, we examine children's noun learning in Luganda, a dominant Bantu language in Uganda. In Study 1, the MacArthur-Bates CDI: Words and Sentences vocabulary checklist was adapted for Luganda. Parents of children aged 17-33 months (n = 27; Mage = 25.4 months; 16 female) were interviewed about their child's comprehension/production of each word. Children with smaller vocabularies showed a "noun bias" in production but favored verbs in comprehension. Children with larger vocabularies favored nouns in comprehension but showed no differences between nouns and verbs in comprehension or production when total nouns/verbs on the list are considered. Study 2 tested children's understanding of two common Luganda noun prefixes (omu- and eki-), asking whether children have linked these prefixes with cognitive categories (e.g. people, artifacts). In an experimental task, children aged 2-4 years (n = 24; M = 3 years; 16 girls) were asked to point to toy objects testing their knowledge of familiar omu- and eki- prefixed nouns and extension of these prefixes to novel nouns. Results showed that younger children could extend the prefix omu- (people, food) to new examples; the eki- prefix (artifacts, despised animals) was extended only by 4-year-olds. Comparing these results to checklist data, interestingly, children knew more nouns for artifacts than animates. Studies of children's acquisition of African languages, especially using experimental methods, are needed. We show evidence for a noun bias in Luganda is mixed and that children can attend to important prefix-cognitive category links - important results for the field.
Fictional stories are often used to teach new information to children. But it is not yet clear how the unrealistic elements that are so common in these stories, particularly anthropomorphism, might affect their learning. Existing research has arrived at contradictory results, with anthropomorphism sometimes helping and sometimes hindering children's learning. To clarify this issue, the current study investigates the effect of varying which characters are anthropomorphized: the story's narrators or the targets of the story's educational material. Children in the United States (N = 143 3- to 7-year-olds) heard one of the four stories, in which either human or kangaroo narrators taught new animal facts and a biological principle (i.e., trait inheritance). Additionally, the animals in the story were depicted either realistically or anthropomorphically. There were no differences across conditions in children's learning of the principle, implying that anthropomorphic depictions neither help nor hinder this kind of learning. But children who saw human narrators learned animal facts significantly better than children who saw kangaroo narrators. These results suggest that anthropomorphism may not have consistent effects on learning, highlighting the need for more fine-grained investigations of how anthropomorphism impacts children's learning from educational media.
The current study investigated the link between subdomains of spatial and math skills in preschool-aged full-term and preterm-born children. We assessed 238 English-speaking children living in the United States (114 girls; 113 preterm, 125 full-term, Mage = 4.79, SD = 0.60) on their spatial (matrix reasoning, mental rotation) and math (counting, cardinality, and arithmetic assessed by addition and subtraction) skills. Regardless of neonatal status, matrix reasoning skills were related to verbal counting, cardinality, and addition performances, whereas mental rotation skills were related to subtraction performance. Among the preterm group, mental rotation was only related to subtraction skills for those with higher gestational age. These findings suggest that space-math links are mostly robust across children following different developmental trajectories, and interventions might focus on specific spatial skills to increase children's targeted math skills.
Autobiographical memories include emotional and personally significant details and can be indicative of mental health. The study examines the variability of emotional content in Estonian children's (N = 201; 52% girls; Mage = 12, range 6 - 17) autobiographical memories of the pandemic and explores links between spontaneous and cued use of positive and negative emotional content and child mental health. Memory interviews were conducted with 201 children across Estonia, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) data were available for 182 participants. Estonian girls included more spontaneous (U = 5915.5, p = 0.02) and cued (U = 6030.5, p = 0.02) emotional content in their memories and scored higher on the Internalizing subscale of the SDQ (U = 4750.5, p = 0.03) than boys. The youngest group of Estonian children (6-9-year-olds) provided the least emotional content compared to all other groups; the oldest group of children (15 years and older) used more Positive emotional content in total than 10-12-year-olds. In Estonian children, age, gender, and spontaneous positive emotional content in pandemic memories predicted higher SDQ Internalizing scores, with girls, older children, and those recalling more positivity showing greater internalizing symptoms.
This study investigated whether children exhibit gendered expectations and evaluations of empathy, exploring the developmental origins of stereotypes observed in adults. A sample of 112 children (Mage = 6.02 years, SDage = 1.14, 54 girls) aged 4–7 years participated, recruited from Southern California. Participants were predominantly White (54%), with additional representation from Asian (20%), Black or African American (4%), Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (1%), multiracial (11%), and other (10%) backgrounds. Seventeen percent identified as Hispanic/Latinx, and 79% of participants had one or more parent with post-secondary degree(s). Using story-based tasks, children predicted girl and boy characters’ empathic responses and evaluated girl and boy characters’ niceness based on their empathic or counter-empathic responses. Findings revealed that children did not predict greater empathy from girls than boys, suggesting early childhood expectations of empathy are largely egalitarian. Niceness evaluations for empathizers and counter-empathizers were not measurably influenced by character gender, though the difference in ratings for empathizers versus counter-empathizers strengthened with age. Notably, female participants evaluated empathizers–of both genders–more positively than male participants, though they also gave slightly higher baseline niceness ratings of characters who had not had a chance to empathize. No differences by participant gender were observed in evaluations of counter-empathizers. Results suggest that societal stereotypes associating girls with greater empathy emerge later in development, potentially influenced by socialization processes. We discuss the role of socialization in developing gendered expectations of empathy and possible factors that may influence gender differences in the valuing of empathy.
Several theories propose that the declarative memory system plays important roles in language development, but evidence in early childhood remains limited. This is a critical gap, since children experience remarkable leaps in their language abilities in early childhood. Although previous meta-analyses reported significant correlations between declarative memory and language abilities in older children, those studies primarily relied on verbal memory measures, which may inflate correlations due to shared linguistic demands. This meta-analysis addresses these issues by examining associations between a widely studied, well-characterized measure of nonverbal declarative memory (deferred imitation) and language abilities in early childhood. A systematic literature search identified 14 effect sizes (total N = 226) involving typically developing children aged 9 to 50 months, all of whom happened to be from Central and Northern Europe (largely Swedish and German). Multilevel meta-analysis with robust variance estimation revealed a significant positive correlation between deferred imitation and language abilities (across receptive, productive, behavioral, and parental report measures), indicating that higher declarative memory abilities are associated with more advanced language development. Moderator analyses revealed no significant effects of age, time between memory and language tasks, or language task type (receptive vs. productive; parental-report vs. objective). Taken together with previous findings, the available evidence suggests that declarative memory contributes to language development from early childhood and that this relationship is robust across different methodological contexts. The results contribute to converging evidence that declarative memory plays important roles in language.
Children experience competition daily, with these situations requiring children to balance goal attainment with social relationships. Increasingly, within children's spaces (e.g. schools, sports clubs), there are discussions regarding the benefit or risk of children's participation in competition. Yet, there is limited work examining the contextual and individual factors that relate to children's behavior when engaging in competition. Addressing this gap, the present study explored how competitive game outcome and children's individual characteristics, including socio-cognitive skills (emotion regulation, theory of mind, executive functioning) and socio-demographics (age, gender) related to their task performance and social behavior toward opponents. Canadian children (ages 4 to 9, N = 143) competed against virtual peers in a series of online games wherein they had to "collect" objects, with the game outcome rigged. To measure social behavior, children sent messages and indicated the number of stickers that should be given to the opponent. While the overall performance did not differ by individual factors, girls and children with better emotion regulation showed a greater difference in performance between winning and losing (with a difference in scores expected due to the game programming). The coded prosociality of messages was not related to individual or contextual factors, but sticker distributions were predicted by ToM (higher ToM related to fewer stickers) and gender (when winning, girls gave more stickers than boys). Findings highlight the importance of considering individual factors, such as gender, emotion regulation, and ToM, when understanding children's responses to winning and losing during competition.
Children can be primed to anticipate a recently heard sentence structure. This is more likely to occur when the structures of the primes are unlikely, or surprising, for a given context. The disfluency (uh) is more likely to occur in these surprising sentences. Moreover, recent work suggests that children may anticipate alternative sentence structures when encountering this type of disfluency. This anticipation could lead to differences in how well expectations align with the input and, consequently, differences in how likely children are to be primed. However, whether disfluencies modulate priming effects has not been explored. In a comprehension priming task with English-speaking 3- and 5-year-olds living in the United States, we found that children's parsing preferences were altered by disfluent primes. When children heard disfluent primes, priming effects were reduced, or children were primed by the structure associated with the prime's verb bias rather than the actual heard structure. The strength and the onset of these effects differed by the speaker's predictability and the children's age.
