Early childhood is a sensitive period for cognitive, language, and socio-emotional development, with parental engagement playing a central role. In Argentina, families facing socioeconomic adversity often encounter barriers that limit access to developmentally enriching parent-child activities; heightening developmental risk amid ongoing economic instability. We conducted an exploratory proof-of-concept study adapting low-cost parent-child activity packs-originally co-developed in the UK-for use in Argentina. The adaptation prioritised cultural relevance, developmental suitability, material accessibility, and day-to-day feasibility, with guidance from a local healthcare professional to ensure alignment with local caregiving practices. The adapted packs were distributed to 73 vulnerable families who attended one of eighteen Early Childhood Centres (CPI Centro de Primera Infancia). Parents provided feedback through surveys (N = 73) and sessions (N = 45). Infant development (N = 73) was assessed with the Bayley-III Scales. Parents reported increases in the frequency and variety of parent-child activities, alongside significant improvements in indicators of home learning environment quality. Thematic analysis identified perceived benefits for children (enjoyment, stimulation), families (stronger emotional bonds), and caregivers (greater capability, opportunity and motivation to engage in parent-child activities), as well as suggestions for refinement. As expected in a short-term, small-scale study of a light-touch programme, no significant changes were observed in Bayley-III scores. As an exploratory proof of concept, the results indicate that culturally-adapted, low-cost interventions are acceptable and can help strengthen caregiver support and early learning in disadvantaged contexts. Aligned with SDGs 1,3,4, and 10, this model offers a scalable approach to enhancing parental engagement and equitable access to early learning.
How do children and adolescents reason about the consequences of institutional reward systems? We examined developmental differences in reasoning about inclusive versus selective awards in a youth sports context. Participants in two age groups (43 in the 7- to 9-year-old age group and 44 in the 15- to 18-year-old age group; 46% female, 49% male, 5% other or preferred not to say; majority Asian/White; USA, 2024-2025) read scenarios in which trophies were awarded either to all participants or only to top performers in a running race and predicted motivational, emotional, and behavioral outcomes. Across age groups, participants expected selective awards to increase effort and pride, suggesting that by 7 years of age children recognize links between incentive structures and task engagement. By adolescence, systematic reasoning expanded to include the possibility that selective incentives could motivate behavior that conflicts with social norms or personal safety, including cheating and risk-taking. In addition, adolescents', but not children's, preferences for reward systems were systematically related to their own perceived running ability, suggesting that evaluations of incentive systems increasingly align with self-interest across development. Together, these findings reveal both continuity and change in how young people reason about incentive systems: children as young as 7 linked reward systems to effort and pride, whereas adolescents additionally made inferences about self-interest and norm-conflicting behavior.
Violence against children violates human rights and fundamentally challenges the global objectives outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Children may frequently experience harsh discipline in both homes and schools, two main settings for early learning and development, yet longitudinal evidence on the developmental consequences of exposure to harsh discipline across these two settings remains scarce in Sub-Saharan Africa. Further, the interaction between harsh discipline at home and in school remains underexplored. Drawing on data from a longitudinal study in Ghana, we examine whether repeated exposure to harsh discipline at home and school across three years (which we define as "cumulative exposure") among pre-primary school children aged 5-8 years (N = 663; Mage = 6.94 years). By controlling for baseline outcomes in a value-added design, we estimated the robust associations between cumulative harsh discipline at home and at schools with higher-order cognitive skills, namely academic and executive function. Cumulative harsh discipline at home significantly predicted lower academic skills (𝛽 = -0.045, p < 0.05) but not executive function, while cumulative harsh discipline at school did not statistically significantly predict any skills. Moderation analyses showed that children's experiences of harsh discipline at home were negatively associated with executive function under conditions of low levels of harsh discipline at school. Findings highlight the urgent need for integrated, contextually grounded interventions targeting home and school disciplinary practices to support early learning and development in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Healthy and stimulating early life environments are key for children to develop to their full potential. Household socioeconomic status (SES) is a strong predictor of early child development (ECD). This study used a rich new dataset from Andean Peru to examine the pathways through which household SES shapes ECD. Drawing on frameworks from multiple disciplines, we consider early life health, family well-being, and family investment as mediating pathways. Factors were assessed at two time points in a sample of 2702 parent-child dyads (49.7% children female). Measurements were conducted at infancy (M child age = 5.02 months) and toddlerhood (M child age = 29.62 months). We estimated two structural equation models to examine the direct and indirect pathways between SES and ECD. Results show that while SES predict children's health and environments in infancy and toddlerhood, the links between mediators and ECD differ by developmental stage. During infancy, the pathways between SES and ECD are explained in part by birth weight, maternal social support, stimulation activities, and learning materials. During toddlerhood the association is explained in part by child nutritional status (height-for-age) and learning materials. All three pathways explained some, but not all, of the SES-ECD gaps, with family investments emerging as the largest contributor. This highlights the complex and multidimensional nature of SES-ECD gaps, indicates that additional pathways must be integrated, and informs a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms that may explain how socioeconomic well-being influences early thriving in a low-resource Peruvian setting, with implications for similar Majority World contexts.
The current study explored whether the associations between language and socioemotional (SE) development differ across various facets of language and SE domains, as well as across dual language learners (DLLs) with and without baseline English proficiency at Head Start entry. Cross-lagged panel analyses were conducted on 471 Hispanic Spanish-English DLLs (Mage = 41 months old; 49% girls) in Head Start programs, who were followed for two years from the program entry to kindergarten. Results supported unidirectional effects of prior Spanish receptive vocabulary and conceptual expressive vocabulary on subsequent SE development for the full sample. When examining the two DLL groups separately based on English proficiency at program entry, we found that the full-sample results were primarily driven by Emergent Bilinguals, that is, DLLs developing English proficiency. For Bilinguals, that is, DLLs with stronger English proficiency, a reciprocal, bidirectional association emerged between Spanish receptive vocabulary and SE skills. Our findings suggest the significant role of DLLs' home language (Spanish) in their SE development, and vice versa, indicating possible benefits of intentionally integrating heritage language supports into SE-focused curricula and classroom.
Few studies have systematically examined social adjustment of left-behind children. A longitudinal study with three waves was conducted on 512 Chinese left-behind children to address the gaps. The unconditional latent growth curve model revealed a linear decline in problem behaviors over time, whereas prosocial behaviors and school engagement showed an increasing trend. The conditional latent growth curve model indicated significant differences by gender and left-behind status in the initial levels of problem behavior, prosocial behavior, and school engagement. Children with different left-behind statuses exhibited distinct developmental patterns of prosocial behaviors. Parent-child cohesion played a protective role in problem behaviors, prosocial behaviors, and school engagement. These findings underline the protective role of parent-child cohesion and highlight the importance of providing targeted social services for different types of left behind children.
Caregiver-infant vocal interactions are foundational for early development, yet most evidence is derived from brief laboratory or home-visit observations and assessing caregiver-infant vocal contingency in everyday settings requires scalable methods. To this end, we integrated machine learning (ML) with traditional event-based analyses to measure maternal contingent vocal responsiveness assessed from daylong audio recordings in the home. In Study 1 (N = 61 infants; 1-18 months, Mage = 9.43 months), we evaluated a wav2vec2-based audio tagging algorithm to detect infant nondistress and distress vocalizations and caregiver vocalizations. Performance was high when tested against human annotations. In Study 2 (N = 56 infants; 1-10 months; Mage = 6.61 months), we applied the algorithm to daylong home audio recordings. Maternal response rates based on ML-generated labels showed strong correspondence with those based on human-annotated labels, although a consistent positive bias was observed (ML > human). Response-rate distributions tended toward higher values in the 20 most voluble segments relative to all available mother-infant interaction segments. Additionally, on average, the 20 most voluble segments (vs all available segments) produced higher maternal response rates but lower base-rate-adjusted estimates of contingency. Response rates increased with lag window, and in most cases, the sharpest increase was observed between 1 and 2 s, with diminishing returns thereafter. Together, these findings support ML-derived vocalization labels for scalable contingency estimation and underscore analytic decisions regarding sampling and lag window when estimating maternal contingent responsiveness from daylong home recordings.
Although deception is common in early childhood, accurately detecting deception remains a significant challenge. The present study aims to investigate the feasibility of using high-dimensional statistical methods to detect children's deception through facial expressions, with a focus on incorporating two time-dependent statistics: slope and fitness. We analyzed the facial expressions of 93 three- to six-year-old children during a guessing game. A machine vision algorithm (FACET) assessed the likelihood of nine basic facial expressions. We extracted three statistics (mean, slope and fitness) for each facial expression. Then, we used high-dimensional feature selection method to filter out irrelevant features. We adopted two parametric (logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis) and two non-parametric statistical methods (random forest, adaptive boosting) and tested both the full feature set ("full model") and the selected feature set ("2-step model"). The results showed adding time-dependent statistics (slope and fitness) improved performance, with the average balanced accuracy increasing from 47.2% to 62.0%. Feature selection further enhanced the model performance (from 60.8% to 63.3%). In addition, balanced accuracy provided a more conservative and reliable measure than the original accuracy (54.6% vs. 61.5%). These findings demonstrate the feasibility of using dynamic facial emotional features to detect deception in early childhood and highlight the potential of computational methods for advancing developmental research on emotion and social cognition.
Throughout childhood development, children learn social norms by observing how others behave. The current study used an adapted simplified public forest task, in which groups of three children sharing 30 trees, to investigate whether observing peers-friends or strangers-who demonstrated a lower-resource-extraction norm (i.e., cutting 4/5 trees) or a higher-resource-extraction norm (i.e., cutting 15/16 trees) would influence children's pro-environmental behavior. Participants were 5-year-old and 6-year-old children from kindergarten. Information about peers' resource extraction was presented verbally by the experimenters, who informed children about the number of trees that friends or strangers had previously cut. The results showed that 5-year-olds exhibited greater pro-environmental behavior under the lower- than the higher-resource-extraction norm when the peer was a friend, but this difference was not observed when the peer was a stranger. In contrast, 6-year-olds' pro-environmental behavior did not differ between the lower- and higher-resource-extraction norms, regardless of whether the peer was a friend or a stranger. These results indicate that social distance moderates the influence of peer resource-extraction norms on 5-year-olds' pro-environmental behavior, but not on that of 6-year-olds. These findings provide preliminary evidence that environmental education for 5-year-olds may benefit from considering friends' resource-extraction norms.
How culture shapes brain functional alteration and its development remains poorly understood in dyslexia (DD). Hereby, we conducted a meta-analysis comparing brain activation in children across Chinese (logographic), English (deep alphabetic), and German (shallow alphabetic) writing systems. A total of 48 studies involving 1554 participants were included, consisting of 695 typically developing controls and 859 individuals with DD. Results revealed universal neurobiological signatures of DD characterized by convergent hypoactivation in the left fusiform gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule across languages. Language-specific reductions were identified: the left inferior frontal gyrus in Chinese, the left inferior temporal gyrus in English, and the left inferior parietal lobule in German. Developmental meta-regressions demonstrated that in deep orthographic languages (English, Chinese), older children showed more convergent inferior temporal gyrus hypoactivation, suggesting atypical ventral stream maturation. Conversely, younger DD children exhibited more convergent hypoactivation in the superior temporal gyrus in alphabetic languages, indicating delayed dorsal stream development. These findings provided novel cross-linguistic evidence of how neural atypicalities in DD differentially develop across writing systems, highlighting dynamic interactions between linguistic characteristics and neurodevelopmental plasticity in DD.
Poor reading has been associated with impaired simultaneous visual processing of multiple graphic symbols composed of separable features, a behavioral marker of reduced visual attention based on parietal dysfunction. We designed a visual search screening test, consisting of finding the (unique) black circle among circles combined with a bar of various length and location (black symbols) versus among circles of various colors. The temporal Gap between these symbol and color search conditions was previously validated as a significant visuo-attentional contributor of reading between ages 8 and 11, predicting its performance with moderate sensitivity, as reading difficulty is multifactorial, but high specificity. Here, we established its good positive predictive value in a longitudinal study with the same children being screened in kindergarten (at 3, 4, or 5 years old) and later assessed for reading performance at the second semester of third grade (at 8 years old). We also assessed 4 and/or 5 years old children with the knowledge of letter names, the early reading of classmates' first names and of small frequent words. The visual search screening test predicted future reading performance with lower correlation strength but as early as 3 years old, providing more lead time for specific preventive educational or clinical intervention during kindergarten in a subgroup whose pathological visual search performance at Age 3 was associated with a 5.7 times greater likelihood of later reading difficulties.
Whether an optimal school-entry age exists is widely debated. A sequential cohort longitudinal design was used to investigate how school-entry deferral affected executive function development, and parent-reported socio-emotional and self-regulatory outcomes in 110 children (majority White) over one academic year. Groups comprised: 35 Deferred School Entrants (Mage = 66 months, 17 females), 31 Non-deferred School Entrants (Mage = 57 months, 13 females), and 44 Deferred Pre-schoolers (Mage = 55 months, 22 females). Deferral was associated with improved parent-reported socio-emotional and self-regulatory outcomes, especially in children with initially lower scores, while schooling benefited working memory progress. Further, older children started school with better working memory and inhibitory control relative to younger school entrants, although baseline differences had partly waned over the school year. These results highlight the value of accounting for regulatory skills underlying both cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes within school entrance age debates. Further research is required to determine if, and how, this might relate to academic outcomes.
This article examines preschool attendance and reading proficiency among students from families that do not speak the test language at home. Both indicators are key targets of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to promote equity in education. We analyze gaps in reading achievement and preschool participation between students who speak the test language at home and those who do not. The study also considers how these gaps intersect with socioeconomic background, focusing on students who face both linguistic and economic barriers. Using data from the 15 education systems that participated in all progress in international reading literacy study (PIRLS) cycles, we assess how these gaps have developed over time. Our findings show that significant gaps persist in most educational systems and, in some cases, have even widened. These social inequalities are especially marked among students with low socioeconomic status. We further examine how preschool attendance relates to reading achievement in grade 4 and whether this relationship varies by language and socioeconomic background. The analysis reveals that preschool attendance is particularly beneficial for students from non-test-language and lower socioeconomic backgrounds-groups that are also less likely to have access to early education. Our findings highlight a paradox: the children who would benefit most from attending preschool are those least likely to have access to it. SUMMARY: Access to preschool for non-test-language students has stagnated, with a growing gap in access between families speaking the test language at home and those who do not. A persistent basic literacy gap exists between family language groups, especially among students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Preschool attendance improves basic literacy outcomes, especially for doubly disadvantaged students from non-test-language backgrounds and lower socioeconomic status. This presents a notable paradox: those who benefit the most from attending pre-primary education are also the ones that are least likely to attend.
Humans begin tuning in to the prosody of their native language even before birth. Previous studies with newborns have reported language-specific processing of forward versus backward speech and of intonational contours, as well as sensitivity to iambic versus trochaic patterns in non-linguistic tone stimuli. The present study investigated newborns' processing of temporal rhythm patterns in naturalistic native-language speech. Czech-learning newborns (N = 44) listened to naturally recorded, well-formed Czech utterances with either native Czech rhythm (lacking prominent acoustic cues to word-level stress) or foreign-accented rhythm (featuring prolonged foot-initial syllables), while their hemodynamic activity was recorded. Results revealed larger hemodynamic responses to native-language speech with foreign rhythm than to native-language speech with native rhythm. This difference was most pronounced in the right hemisphere, indicating right-lateralized processing of speech rhythm differences. Traditional theories of language development have suggested that only broad, between-class rhythm differences among languages are processed at birth. By showing that newborns discriminate between native and foreign rhythmic patterns even when their native language falls outside traditional rhythm classifications, the present findings evidence that gradient temporal cues alone are sufficient for early language discrimination.
This study investigates the effects of gaming genres on behavioral and neural mechanisms of Chinese orthographic processing. A total of 1462 primary school students completed a gaming and reading experience questionnaire and an orthographic judgment task, with 45 participants undergoing fMRI scans during orthographic and font size judgment tasks. Participants were categorized into three groups: action video gamers, non-action video gamers, and non-video gamers. Behavioral analyses revealed that action video gamers outperformed the other groups in orthographic skills, when age, gender, and video gaming time were statistically controlled. Neural analyses focused on modular interactions among vision, attention, and working memory networks. During the orthographic judgment task, action video gamers exhibited significantly stronger vision-working memory modular interaction compared to the other groups. No significant group differences were observed in vision-attention modular interactions during the orthographic judgment task or in any modular interaction during the font size judgment task, suggesting cognition-specific and task-specific effects. These findings highlight the potential benefits of action video gaming on orthographic processing and its associated neural networks, particularly in integrating vision and working memory. SUMMARY: Action video gamers outperformed others in orthographic processing skills. Action video gaming was associated with better vision-working memory neural interactions. Modular interactions were cognition-specific and task-specific.
Children's oral language and self-regulation skills are critical for healthy development and life trajectories. ENRICH is a preventive intervention developed for early childhood teachers to enhance these skills in toddlers. Kia Tīmata Pai (Best Start study) is a longitudinal cluster randomized controlled trial in 136 New Zealand early childhood education centers testing the impact of ENRICH with 1875 teachers on 1481 toddlers' (M = 20.6 months at recruitment; 72% European, 24% Māori, 23% Asian, 9% Pacific using a total response method; 7% low-SES, 40% middle-SES, 53% high-SES) oral language and self-regulation skills. After 18 months, ENRICH produced benefits for children's oral language and self-regulation skills (parent and teacher ratings) and for early literacy and social skills (teacher ratings) compared to an active control condition. Oral language benefits (parent ratings) emerged earlier for children from low- and mid-socioeconomic (SES) families and whose mothers had lower educational qualifications. Benefits for oral language and self-regulation skills at age 3 held regardless of children's SES, ethnicity, bilingual status, initial language level, age, and maternal education. Benefits for oral language at age 3 were moderated by child sex and differed by informant, with teachers perceiving greater ENRICH benefits for boys, and parents for girls. The likely mechanism of ENRICH's effects is through sensitive serve-and-return interactions that support children's oral language and attention skills. ENRICH is a potentially powerful tool for supporting toddlers' language, cognitive, and socioemotional development with possible downstream effects for academic achievement, health, and well-being. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/iIV1l0-cKIo. SUMMARY: ENRICH is a new oral language preventive intervention designed for early childhood education teachers of toddlers based on serve-and-return and rich conversations across the day. A longitudinal cluster randomized controlled trial showed that ENRICH improved toddlers' oral language, self-regulation, emergent literacy, and social skills compared to an active control condition. Oral language benefits emerged earlier for toddlers from low- and middle-socioeconomic status (SES) families and whose mothers had lower educational qualifications. Benefits for oral language and self-regulation skills at age 3 held regardless of children's SES, maternal education, ethnicity, bilingual status, initial language level, and age.
When determining the meaning of new words, young children have a variety of cues available to them. Two types of such cues are referential attention (e.g., gaze and point cues), and lexical constraints, such as mutual exclusivity biases. This is likely also true for deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL), however, the visual modality of the language and the variation in individual early language experience may affect the extent to which they prioritize these cues in ways that are different from hearing children acquiring spoken language. In the current study, we examined the relative use of gaze following and mutual exclusivity to learn new signs in a sample of young deaf children (ages 20-60 months) acquiring ASL. In a behavioral two alternative forced-choice paradigm, children were asked to choose between two objects (one familiar, one novel) using a prompt with a gaze cue, a novel sign, or both cues in conflict. Our findings demonstrate that young deaf children recruit mutual exclusivity in determining referent labels if their early language experience is primarily monolingual in ASL, while those who were bimodal bilingual in ASL and spoken English showed less clear preferences. Children did not show a clear preference for gaze cues or mutual exclusivity when the two cues were presented in conflict. This study informs our understanding of the language acquisition process in ASL and provides further evidence for accounts of how children learning language across modalities recruit referential versus lexical cues to support word learning. SUMMARY: Deaf children acquiring American Sign Language demonstrated a mutual exclusivity bias when mapping novel signs to novel objects. Bimodal bilingual children (acquiring ASL and English) were not as clear in their use of mutual exclusivity relative to monolingual (acquiring ASL only) peers. Children relied on adult gaze as a reliable referential cue, particularly in the monolingual group, and this strengthened with age. Children did not show a clear preference for gaze or linguistic cues when the two were presented in conflict.
Current understanding of how facial and vocal cues can communicate emotional intent is based on patterns observed in adults, with surprisingly little known about age-related differences in nonverbal expression. Do adolescents and adults use different nonverbal cues to express emotions? This cross-sectional laboratory study revealed age-related differences in how early adolescents (ages 10-11; N = 64), mid-adolescents (ages 12-15; N = 54), and emerging adults (ages 18-25; N = 50) use facial movements and vocal cues to intentionally convey emotions. Adolescents showed lessened use of facial movements linked to prototypical expressions of happiness and fear, and less differentiated facial movements to convey distinct emotions. Early adolescents also spoke louder (particularly to express happiness), slower, and with higher harmonicity than mid-adolescents and emerging adults when expressing emotions. Findings suggest that our understanding of facial and vocal cues involved in emotional expression may not generalize to adolescents, and that nonverbal communication patterns may mature into adult-like forms during adolescence.Summary Findings from this study indicate that adolescents and emerging adults use different patterns of facial movements and vocal cues to purposefully communicate their emotional intent. The ability to convey emotional intent using nonverbal cues may mature into adult-like forms during adolescence.
People learn most effectively when they can flexibly modify strategies to accommodate environmental changes. Here, we explore how chronic early life stress influences the ways individuals weight and prioritize new information when making decisions. To do so, we examined the choices of 11-16-year-old children in a reward learning task. Children varied on their level of stress exposure. We used a Bayesian computational learning model to assess whether differences in children's decision making were driven by difference in their expectations about the task environment. Children with high stress exposure switched their responses rather than maintaining choices that had previously been effective for them when making decisions about rewards. This switching was driven by children with high stress exposure expecting environments to be more volatile. These findings offer insight into how early life experiences can shape the subsequent parameters of human learning.Summary How experience shapes an individual's ability to flexibly adjust learning strategies when making decisions is not well understood. Using behavioral tasks combined with a novel computational model, we find exposure to high stress environments biases children towards learning strategies optimal to unpredictable environments. Stress in childhood shapes the development of learning parameters in ways that have implications for decision making.
In-group bias is a barrier to cooperation between groups, particularly between refugee and host community members, where intergroup conflict can lead to discrimination and exclusion from essential resources. We investigated whether in-group bias exists between Rohingya refugee and Bangladeshi host community children (N = 481, 50.1% female, 5-10 years of age), and whether a brief, virtual collaboration with an out-group peer would reduce bias. We found that children from both communities exhibited robust in-group preferences and bias was stronger in the host community on several measures. Furthermore, the experience of virtual collaboration with an out-group peer did not impact in-group bias on any of the measures. While we did not find a reduction in in-group bias following virtual intergroup collaboration, our findings underscore the importance of continued research on bias-reduction interventions among refugee and host community children. SUMMARY: Children from both Rohingya refugee and Bangladeshi host communities exhibited robust in-group bias. In-group bias was stronger among host community children and tended to increase with age. A brief virtual collaboration with an out-group peer did not reduce in-group bias between children from Rohingya refugee and Bangladeshi host communities.
