Child development最新文献

Recent studies suggest that cognateness boosts bilingual lexical acquisition. This study proposes an account in which language co-activation accelerates accumulation of word-learning instances across languages. This account predicts a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language than in the higher-exposure language, as the former receive co-activation from their translations more frequently. Bayesian Item Response Theory was used to model acquisition trajectories for 604 Catalan-Spanish translations from a dataset of 366 12–32 month-old bilinguals (M = 22.23 months, 175 female, mainly White, collected 2020–2022). Results show a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language (d = .276), than for words in the higher-exposure language (d = .022), supporting a language exposure-moderated account for the effect of cognateness on lexical acquisition.

This study examined children's self-assessment of their prosociality, relative to average peers, in situations where the recipient is described as “needy” versus “not needy” (at a school of average socioeconomic level in south Israel; N = 158; aged 6–12 years; 51% males, December–May 2021). The results show that older children exhibited the better-than-average (BTA) effect by seeing themselves as more generous than peers. In contrast, younger children displayed the worse-than-average effect by expecting peers to be more generous than themselves. However, both effects were attenuated ($��{\eta }_p^2�$ = .16) when the recipient was described as “needy,” leading to higher expectations of sharing from oneself and others. This implies that besides children's motivational tendency to self-evaluate as BTA, they also base their evaluations on actual environmental cues.

This comprehensive longitudinal study explored for the first time the interrelations between neonatal brainstem abnormalities, focused attention (FA), and learning—following a preterm cohort (N = 175; 46.3% female; predominantly White) from birth (2003–2006) to 17 years. The findings indicated that FA during early childhood was associated with language outcomes in toddlerhood (n = 131) and academic and attention self-report indices in late adolescence (n = 44). Pilot assessments indicated that FA at 17 years (n = 25) was also associated with concurrent academic and attention functioning. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that neonatal brainstem functioning, manifested in auditory brainstem response patterns, was associated with early-life FA competence, which affected learning development. Implications underscore the essential role of early brainstem function and FA in shaping childhood learning trajectories.

Our study on 328 five- to six-year-old kindergarteners (mainly White European living in France, 152 girls) shows that children who do not count on their fingers and undergo finger counting training exhibit drastic improvement in their addition skills from pre-test to post-test (i.e., accuracy from 37.3% to 77.1%) compared to a passive control group (39.6% to 47.8%) (p < .001, $��{\eta }_p^2�$ = .15). This result was replicated on a much smaller scale (37 five- to six-year-olds, mainly White European, 22 girls) but in more controlled setup and was further replicated with an active control group (84 five- to six-year-olds, mainly White European, 37 girls). Therefore, we demonstrate here for the first time that training finger counting constitutes a highly effective method to improve kindergarteners' arithmetic performance.

Cyr, E. N., Kroeper, K. M., Bergsieker, H. B., Dennehy, T. C., Logel, C., Steele, J. R., … Spencer, S. J. (2024). Girls are good at STEM: Opening minds and providing evidence reduces boys' stereotyping of girls' STEM ability. Child Development, 95(2), 636–647.

In Table 2, two non-focal covariate labels (“Site” and “Year”) were reversed. Row 3 should say “Year” and Row 4 should say “Site (F)”. No intervention-related results or conclusions were affected by this covariate labeling reversal.

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This study tests whether developments in self-knowledge and autobiographical memory across early to late childhood are related. Self-descriptions and autobiographical memory reports were collected from 379 three- to eleven-year-old predominantly white Scottish children, M_age = 90.3 months, SD = 31.1, 54% female. Episodic memory was measured in an enactment task involving recall and source monitoring of performed and witnessed actions. The volume and complexity of self-knowledge and autobiographical memory reports increased with age, as did source monitoring ability and recall bias for own actions. Regression analyses and structural equation modeling confirmed a close association between these developments. These results inform our theoretical understanding of the development of the self-memory system in childhood, which may contribute to the gradual offset of childhood amnesia.

This research examined the link between persistence and cheating in 3- to 6-year-old children (2021–2022, N = 200, 100 boys; M_age = 4.85 years; all middle-class Han Chinese). Study 1 used a challenging game to measure whether children would cheat when they were allowed to play the game unsupervised. Results indicated that children's situational, but not trait, persistence negatively correlated with cheating: the higher children's situational persistence, the less likely they cheated. Study 2 not only replicated the results of Study 1 but also discovered that children who cheated became less persistent afterward. Our research reveals a novel bidirectional relation between situational persistence and cheating and underscores the importance of nurturing persistence in early childhood as a strategy to foster honesty.

Little is known about language development after late-to-moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal-pair word-learning skills in 18 eighteen-month-old healthy full-term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late-to-moderate preterm infants (mean GA at birth 33.7 weeks; 11 males; 100% Caucasian). Data were collected in the local urban area of Barcelona city from May 2015 to August 2016. Toddlers first associated two pseudo-words, forming a minimal pair based on a voice onset time distinction of the initial consonant, with two unfamiliar objects during a habituation phase. A visual choice test assessed their recognition of the two novel word-object associations and some familiar word-object pairs. While full-terms successfully mapped the similar sounding pair of novel words (d = 1.57), preterms could not (d = 0.17). These results suggest that late to moderate preterm birth can hinder basic associative learning mechanisms relying on fine temporal speech features.

Humans are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn, but the developmental origins of curiosity-driven exploration remain unclear. We investigated the computational principles guiding 4-year-old children's exploration during a touchscreen game (N = 102, F = 49, M = 53, primarily white and middle-class, data collected in the Netherlands from 2021–2023). Children guessed the location of characters that were hiding following predictable (yet noisy) patterns. Children could freely switch characters, which allowed us to quantify when they decided to explore something different and what they chose to explore. Bayesian modeling of their responses revealed that children selected activities that were more novel and offered greater learning progress (LP). Moreover, children's interest in making LP correlated with better learning performance. These findings highlight the importance of novelty and LP in guiding children's exploration.

This study examined the influence of linguistic input on the development of productive and receptive skills across three fundamental language domains: lexico-semantics, syntax, and phonology. Seventy-one (35 female) Basque-Spanish bilingual children were assessed at three time points (Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Winter 2021), between 4 and 6 years of age, by specifically examining language knowledge and spontaneous language use in each language. A direct impact of the amount of linguistic exposure on the longitudinal growth of lexico-semantic and syntactic abilities was observed in both languages. While phonological skills were not directly influenced by exposure, they were more proficient in the more exposed language. The use of lexically diverse and syntactically rich utterances developed relatively later than language knowledge, both supported by the amount of linguistic exposure.