Vocabulary knowledge is foundational to educational success, but significant gaps exist between students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those with reading disabilities and their peers. These gaps have cascading effects, as children with lower vocabulary knowledge are less likely to acquire new words through independent reading and are less responsive to vocabulary instruction methods like read-alouds and explicit teaching. The effectiveness of explicit instruction relies on individualization, which typically places substantial demands on educators and thereby hinders the adoption of evidence-based methods. A potential solution is using audiobooks supplemented by explicit and individualized remote instruction from paraprofessionals. We conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) intervention study in which children listened to audiobooks along with text, either alone or with scaffolded instructional support. Third and fourth-grade students (N = 314, age: mean (SD) = 9.47(.56) years) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Audiobooks-Only, Audiobooks+Scaffold, or active control) for 8 weeks. Participants in the two audiobook intervention groups showed significant improvements in receptive and expressive vocabulary, while the active control group showed no improvement. The effectiveness of the intervention varied based on reading ability and socioeconomic status (SES): poor readers benefited only in the Audiobooks+Scaffold group, whereas children from lower-SES backgrounds improved with audiobook access alone, especially if they were already proficient readers. Additionally, the Audiobooks+Scaffold group spent more time listening to recommended audiobooks during the study. These findings suggest that text-supplemented audiobooks, particularly when combined with personalized support, can be a valuable tool for supporting vocabulary development in struggling readers.

Creating engaging language stimuli suitable for children can be difficult and time-consuming. To simplify and accelerate the process, we developed an automated pipeline that combines existing audio generation and animation tools to generate customizable audiovisual stimuli from text input. The pipeline consists of two components: the first uses Google Cloud Text-to-Speech to generate audio stimuli from text, and the second uses Adobe Character Animator to create video stimuli in which an animated character "speaks" the audio with speech-aligned mouth movements. We evaluated the pipeline with two stimulus sets, including an acoustic comparison between generated audio stimuli and existing human-recorded stimuli. The pipeline is efficient, taking less than 2 min to generate each audiovisual stimulus, and fewer than 9 % of stimuli needed to be regenerated. The audio generation component is particularly fast, taking less than 1 s per stimulus. By leveraging automated tools for language stimulus creation, this pipeline can facilitate developmental research on language and other domains of cognition, especially in cognitive neuroscience studies that require large numbers of stimuli.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses significant methodological challenges that have hampered wider adoption. The present work takes stock after the collection of a substantial amount of awake infant fMRI data across multiple studies from two labs at different institutions. We leveraged these data to glean insights on participant recruitment, experimental design, and data acquisition that could be useful to consider for future studies. Across 766 awake infant fMRI sessions, we explored the factors that influenced how much usable data were obtained per session (average of 9 minutes). The age of an infant predicted whether they would successfully enter the scanner (younger was more likely) and, if they did enter, the number of minutes of functional data retained after preprocessing. The amount of functional data retained was also influenced by assigned sex (female more), experimental paradigm (movies better than blocks and events), and stimulus content (social better than abstract). In addition, we assessed the value of attempting to collect multiple experiments per session, an approach that yielded more than one usable experiment averaging across all sessions (including those with no data). Although any given scan is unpredictable, these findings support the feasibility of awake infant fMRI and suggest practices to optimize future research.

Fetal, infant, and toddler (FIT) neuroimaging researchers study early brain development to gain insights into neurodevelopmental processes and identify early markers of neurobiological vulnerabilities to target for intervention. However, the field has historically excluded people from global majority countries and from marginalized communities in FIT neuroimaging research. Inclusive and representative samples are essential for generalizing findings across neuroimaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and cranial ultrasonography. These FIT neuroimaging techniques pose unique and overlapping challenges to equitable representation in research through sampling bias, technical constraints, limited accessibility, and insufficient resources. The present article adds to the conversation around the need to improve inclusivity by highlighting modality-specific historical and current obstacles and ongoing initiatives. We conclude by discussing tangible solutions that transcend individual modalities, ultimately providing recommendations to promote equitable FIT neuroscience.

As scientists interested in fetal, infant, and toddler (FIT) neurodevelopment, our research questions often focus on how individual children differ in their neurodevelopment and the predictive value of those individual differences for long-term neural and behavioral outcomes. Measuring and interpreting individual differences in neurodevelopment can present challenges: Is there a "standard" way for the human brain to develop? How do the semantic, practical, or theoretical constraints that we place on studying "development" influence how we measure and interpret individual differences? While it is important to consider these questions across the lifespan, they are particularly relevant for conducting and interpreting research on individual differences in fetal, infant, and toddler neurodevelopment due to the rapid, profound, and heterogeneous changes happening during this period, which may be predictive of long-term outcomes. This article, therefore, has three goals: 1) to provide an overview about how individual differences in neurodevelopment are studied in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2) to identify challenges and considerations when studying individual differences in neurodevelopment, and 3) to discuss potential implications and solutions moving forward.

Cognition is shaped by individual experiences and interests. However, to study cognition in the brain, researchers typically use generic stimuli that are the same across all individuals. Language, in particular, is animated and motivated by several highly personal factors that are typically not accounted for in neuroimaging study designs, such as "interest" in a topic. Due to its inherently personal and idiosyncratic nature, it is unknown how interest in a topic modulates language processing in the brain. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 children (ages 6.98-12.01 years, mean(SD) = 9.35(1.52), 5 female/15 male) as they listened to personalized narratives about a topic of specific interest, as well as to non-personalized generic narratives. We found that personalized narratives about a topic of interest increased activation in canonical language areas, as well as in reward and self-reference regions. Strikingly, we found that activation patterns elicited by topics of personal interest were more consistent across children, despite their idiosyncratic nature, than activation patterns elicited by narratives about an identical generic topic. These results reinforce the critical role that personal interests play in language processing in the human brain, and demonstrate the feasibility of using a personalized neuroimaging approach to study the effects of individually-varying factors such as interest in the brain.

Much of the language we encounter in our everyday lives comes in the form of conversation, yet the majority of research on the neural basis of language comprehension has used input from only one speaker at a time. Twenty adults were scanned while passively observing audiovisual conversations using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a block-design task, participants watched 20 s videos of puppets speaking either to another puppet (the dialogue condition) or directly to the viewer (the monologue condition), while the audio was either comprehensible (played forward) or incomprehensible (played backward). Individually functionally localized left-hemisphere language regions responded more to comprehensible than incomprehensible speech but did not respond differently to dialogue than monologue. In a second task, participants watched videos (1-3 min each) of two puppets conversing with each other, in which one puppet was comprehensible while the other's speech was reversed. All participants saw the same visual input but were randomly assigned which character's speech was comprehensible. In left-hemisphere cortical language regions, the time course of activity was correlated only among participants who heard the same character speaking comprehensibly, despite identical visual input across all participants. For comparison, some individually localized theory of mind regions and right-hemisphere homologues of language regions responded more to dialogue than monologue in the first task, and in the second task, activity in some regions was correlated across all participants regardless of which character was speaking comprehensibly. Together, these results suggest that canonical left-hemisphere cortical language regions are not sensitive to differences between observed dialogue and monologue.

An important aspect of mental health in children is emotional resilience: the capacity to adapt to, and recover from, stressors and emotional challenges. Variation in trait mindfulness, one's disposition to attend to experiences with an open and nonjudgmental attitude, may be an important individual difference in children that supports emotional resilience. In this study, we investigated whether trait mindfulness was related to emotional resilience in response to stressful changes in education and home-life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We conducted a correlational study examining self-report data from July 2020 to February 2021, from 163 eight-to ten-year-old children living in the US. Higher trait mindfulness scores correlated with less stress, anxiety, depression, and negative affect in children, and lower ratings of COVID-19 impact on their lives. Mindfulness moderated the relationship between COVID-19 child impact and negative affect. Children scoring high on mindfulness showed no correlation between rated COVID-19 impact and negative affect, whereas those who scored low on mindfulness showed a positive correlation between child COVID-19 impact and negative affect. Higher levels of trait mindfulness may have helped children to better cope with a wide range of COVID-19 stressors. Future studies should investigate the mechanisms by which trait mindfulness supports emotional resilience in children.

Objectives School-based mindfulness interventions in children have shown benefits to child well-being. Here, we investigated the effectiveness of a remote, app-based mindfulness intervention for promoting well-being in children. Method We conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with two control groups to examine the effects of an 8-week mindfulness intervention in U.S. children ages 8–10. We compared pre-post effects between a mindfulness intervention using the Inner Explorer app, and two audiobook control interventions. The 279 children who participated in the interventions were assessed on self-report measures of anxiety and depression symptoms, perceived stress and trait mindfulness and we also collected parental reports. Results Over 80% of children completed the intervention in each condition. There was evidence for reduced self-perceived stress in children and reduced negative affect in children by parental reports using the mindfulness app, but no significant reduction for anxiety or depression symptoms. In general, between-group effect sizes were small ( d < 0.45). Regular use, defined as at least 30 days of mindfulness practice within the study period, was associated with reduced child negative affect by parental reports, as well as reduced parental stress and child self-perceived stress. Conclusions These findings suggest that home use of a mindfulness app in young children can have a positive impact on children’s emotional well-being if the app is used regularly, specifically for at least 30 days in the 8-week study period. Strategies aimed at promoting regular use of the mindfulness app at home could lead to even better outcomes for children. Preregistration Preregistered on OSF at https://osf.io/23vax

Humans are fundamentally social animals, and a large portion of the human brain is dedicated to social cognition—the set of mental functions and processes that scaffold our ability to observe, understand, and interact with others. While early philosophers and scientists relied on observation or isolated cases of brain damage to gain insight into social cognition, the advent of new technologies, including noninvasive neuroimaging, has opened a new window into the brain regions that support social cognition in humans, referred to as the social brain. These technologies have elucidated with new precision that individual brain regions are specialized for a variety of social functions including comprehending language, processing faces and emotions, anticipating what a social partner might do next, and even thinking about others’ thoughts. While the building blocks for the social brain are present from birth, individual regions continue to develop into adulthood and are shaped by experience.

Humans are fundamentally social animals, and a large portion of the human brain is dedicated to social cognition—the set of mental functions and processes that scaffold our ability to observe, understand, and interact with others. While early philosophers and scientists relied on observation or isolated cases of brain damage to gain insight into social cognition, the advent of new technologies, including noninvasive neuroimaging, has opened a new window into the brain regions that support social cognition in humans, referred to as the social brain. These technologies have elucidated with new precision that individual brain regions are specialized for a variety of social functions including comprehending language, processing faces and emotions, anticipating what a social partner might do next, and even thinking about others’ thoughts. While the building blocks for the social brain are present from birth, individual regions continue to develop into adulthood and are shaped by experience.

Intervention studies with developmental samples are difficult to implement, in particular when targeting demographically diverse communities. Online studies have the potential to examine the efficacy of highly scalable interventions aimed at enhancing development, and to address some of the barriers faced by underrepresented communities for participating in developmental research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we executed a fully remote randomized controlled trial (RCT) language intervention with third and fourth-grade students (N = 255; age range 8.19-10.72 years, mean = 9.41, SD = 0.52) from diverse backgrounds across the United States. Using this as a case study, we discuss both challenges and solutions to conducting an intensive online intervention through the various phases of the study, including recruitment, data collection, and fidelity of intervention implementation. We provide comprehensive suggestions and takeaways and conclude by summarizing some important tradeoffs for researchers interested in carrying out such studies.

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) strongly predicts disparities in reading development, yet it is unknown whether early environments also moderate the cognitive and neurobiological bases of reading disorders (RD) such as dyslexia, the most prevalent learning disability. SES-diverse 6-9-year-old children (n = 155, half with RD) completed behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks engaging phonological and orthographic processing, which revealed corresponding double-dissociations in neurocognitive deficits. At the higher end of the SES spectrum, RD was most strongly explained by differences in phonological skill and corresponding activation in left inferior frontal and temporoparietal regions during phonological processing-widely considered the "core deficit" of RD. However, at the lower end of the SES spectrum, RD was most strongly explained by differences in rapid naming skills and corresponding activation in left temporoparietal and fusiform regions during orthographic processing. Findings indicate that children's early environments systematically moderate the neurocognitive systems underlying RD, which has implications for assessment and treatment approaches to reduce SES disparities in RD outcomes. Further, results suggest that reliance on high-SES convenience samples may mask critical heterogeneity in the foundations of both typical and disordered reading development.

Language provides a rich source of information about other people’s thoughts and feelings. Consequently, delayed access to language may influence conceptual development in Theory of Mind (ToM). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral tasks to study ToM development in child (n=33, 4-12 years old) and adult (n=36) fluent signers of American Sign Language (ASL), and provide the first characterization of neural ToM responses during an ASL task. Participants included deaf children whose first exposure to ASL was delayed up to 7 years (n=12). Neural responses to ToM stories (specifically, selectivity of the right temporo-parietal junction) in these children resembled responses previously observed in young children, who have the same amount of linguistic experience, rather than those in age-matched native-signing children, who have the same amount of biological maturation. These results suggest that early linguistic experience facilitates ToM development, via the development of a selective brain region for ToM.