Child development最新文献

Previous research finds that children are surprisingly closed to the possibility of unlikely events. Two studies with 5-to-8-year-old children (N = 240; 68% female; mixed ethnicities) and adults (N = 550; 42% female; mixed ethnicities) collected between July 2020 and December 2020, found that children are more open to the possibility of all event types in the future than in the past, and that all age groups were less likely to categorize all event types as impossible when they had the option of categorizing them as "possible, but unlikely" than when they only had the option of calling them "possible." However, many children still frequently categorized unlikely events as impossible. These findings shed light on conditions that influence children's possibility judgments while underscoring their robust tendency to conflate improbability with impossibility.

Relational reasoning (RR) is a higher-order cognitive ability associated with academic performance. Most prior studies on RR-mathematics association have used a cross-sectional design. The current study aimed to examine their longitudinal relations and underlying mechanisms. A sample of 235 sixth graders (138 boys, mean age = 12.32 years, SD = .903) in Hong Kong were tested on RR (nonverbal and verbal) and mathematics achievement (numerical operations and mathematical problem-solving). One hundred and ninety-five (118 boys, mean age = 13.32 years, SD = .945) of them were re-assessed after one year on mathematics achievement and potential mediators (word problem reasoning, arithmetic fluency, and arithmetic principle understanding). Results indicated that nonverbal RR predicted numerical operations through arithmetic principle understanding, and both nonverbal and verbal RR predicted mathematical problem solving through word problem reasoning. The findings advanced the literature on RR-mathematics association and suggested directions for interventions.

This study examined genetic and environmental influences on twins' and parents' positive and negative affect during a parent-child conflict discussion and a positive discussion, captured by automated facial coding. Associations with internalizing, externalizing, and ADHD symptoms were examined. Twins (N = 560 50.94%; female; Mage = 9.72, SD = .94; data collected 2017-2020) and parents (N = 302; 583 videos) were from socioeconomically diverse families, and primarily White (57.07%) or Hispanic (26.78%). Child and parent positive affect were influenced by the shared and nonshared environment and child negative affect was heritable, with similar etiology across tasks. Only child positive affect during the conflict discussion consistently related to lower internalizing, externalizing, and ADHD symptoms (R2: 1.3%-3.6% of variance). Findings support positive affect under stress as an environmentally influenced resilience factor.

Learning to capitalize in English requires identifying a word's type and sentence position. In two cloze studies (2021–2022), Australian students of all genders (95% White, monolingual) spelled words with one and two capitalization cues (proper nouns, sentence-initial words) and no-cue control words. High school (12–18 years, n = 59) and university students (18–63 years, n = 78) exhibited near-perfect capitalization. Primary school students (8–12 years) writing single words (n = 99) used proper-noun cues more than sentence-initial cues (ds > 0.49), but when writing consecutive words (n = 101), capitalized more accurately with two cues than one (ds > 0.32). Early capitalization appears better with more cues, but task format influences children's use of grammatical context.