Developmental Science最新文献

The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study investigated 20–23-month-old infants’ curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to identify any potential advantage for active learning over passive learning. In a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm, infants in one condition were given the opportunity to structure their own information seeking to actively create word learning opportunities for themselves, while infants in two other conditions engaged in learning novel words passively. Infants’ learning of word-object associations was compared across active and passive learning paradigms. The results indicate no advantage of active information selection on retention of novel words above and beyond passive learning, with infants across all conditions retaining novel words above chance. This study provides a crucial insight advancing our understanding of early word learning, and of the mechanisms and benefits of active, curiosity-based learning in infants.

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Prior research has explored children's help-seeking tendencies in relation to the characteristics of help providers with a primary focus on the helper's competencies. In the current study, we propose that acknowledging a child's emotions without judgment, referred to as emotional validation, is another cue that guides children's help-seeking behavior. In Study 1, we surveyed mothers of children aged 3–6 years (N = 200) and found that their tendency to validate their children's emotions was positively associated with the children's help-seeking behavior, particularly among older children (5–6 years). In Study 2, a randomized experiment with children aged 3–6 years (N = 68) tested the causal effect of emotional validation on help-seeking behaviors. When presented with a challenging task, older children (5–6 years) were more likely to seek help from an emotion-validating adult than an emotion-invalidating adult. This pattern was not observed in younger children (3–4 years). These findings underscore the fact that by around the age of 5, children begin to integrate emotional validation into their social evaluations, using it as a critical cue in deciding whom to approach for help. This developmental shift highlights the role of emotional validation in fostering supportive relationships and promoting adaptive help-seeking behaviors.

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The left-hemisphere language cortex is known to be structurally aberrant in developmental dyslexia (also referred to as reading disability, RD). However, studies have not addressed the neuroanatomical bases of dyslexia in bilinguals, even though bilingualism is common, and the bilingual experience is thought to alter the language cortex. This raises the question of whether current brain-based models of dyslexia are applicable to bilinguals. We employed a factorial analysis with participants from the ABCD Study (total N = 268, aged 9–10 years), comparing Bilinguals with RD, Bilingual Controls, Monolinguals with RD, and Monolingual Controls on gray matter volume (GMV) and cortical thickness (CT). RD was determined for reading in English. We included only cultural early bilinguals of Spanish and English; these are prevalent in the United States and represent a homogeneous group of bilinguals who learned their languages early in their home environment. Both main effects analyses (RD vs. Control; Bilingual vs. Monolingual) yielded results for GMV and, to a lesser extent for CT, and the effects for bilingualism were more pronounced than those for dyslexia. Importantly, the interaction analysis revealed no exponential effect, indicating that the neuroanatomical signature of dyslexia is not compounded by experience-dependent plasticity associated with early bilingualism. Our results suggest that brain-based models of dyslexia derived from monolinguals can be generalized to early bilinguals. They also reveal no differences in left-hemisphere language cortex in dyslexia (main effects analysis of RD vs. Controls), suggesting that prior results of GMV and CT differences in these regions from smaller studies may not have been robust.

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Vision is considered the dominant sense for spatial perception. Yet, how vision contributes to its refinement in other modalities remains unclear. Consequently, we investigated the development of audio-tactile spatial integration using a localization task in which participants had to determine the position of auditory, tactile, and audio-tactile stimuli and the influence of visual experience in this process. We tested sighted and blind children at different ages. We found that in sighted children, tactile spatial perception stabilizes earlier than the auditory one, and optimal audio-tactile integration is achieved only after 12 years-of-age. Conversely, blind children showed higher uni-sensory precisions from a younger age, although multisensory performance exhibited minimal improvement through age. Overall, our findings suggest that optimal audio-tactile spatial integration develops late during childhood and that vision might play a pivotal role in this process, that is, the absence of vision prompts earlier development of other sensory modalities when processing bodily stimuli.

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Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder that significantly affects academic learning and social development. Although numerous brain regions have been implicated in DD under both task-based and resting-state conditions, dysfunctions in large-scale functional coordination across brain systems in DD remains poorly understood. Using AES-SDM, we conducted a meta-analysis of seed-based whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) studies, including 12 task-based studies with 226 dyslexics and 232 age-matched controls, and 7 resting-state studies with 120 dyslexics and 145 controls. Results revealed consistently reduced FC between the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the left fusiform gyrus (FFG) in dyslexics compared with age-matched controls across both task and resting states, suggesting a core neural pathway underlying DD. In addition, task-specific abnormalities were identified, including hypoconnectivity between the left IFG and the right cerebellum, and hyperconnectivity between the left IFG and the bilateral angular gyrus (AG), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and left thalamus. By contrast, resting-state analyses identified additional hypoconnectivity between the left FFG and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Together, these findings suggest that DD is associated with widespread disruption in functional integration across the brain, shedding new light on its neural mechanisms of DD and pointing to potential connectivity-based biomarkers for diagnosis.

Summary

Questions about early word knowledge pervade the literature on both typical and atypical language trajectories. To determine which words an infant knows, researchers have relied on two types of measures—caregiver-report and eye-gaze behavior. When these measures are compared, however, their results frequently fail to converge, making it difficult to ascertain whether a given infant knows a given set of words. What are the reasons for these misalignments in gold-standard tasks that are designed to investigate the same underlying construct, and can convergent validity be improved? The current study was designed to investigate multiple methodological features of caregiver-report and looking-while-listening (LWL) tasks hypothesized to contribute to their alignment. American English-learning infants (18–20 months; N = 52) completed an LWL task assessing their understanding of eight early-acquired words. Caregivers reported their child's knowledge of the same eight words, as well as their confidence in their responses and the amount of time they spend with their child. Overall, caregivers’ reports of word knowledge did not predict infants’ eye-gaze behavior. However, the measures were more likely to be aligned when caregivers reported higher confidence in their responses. Caregivers’ reports about both the target and the distractor word on each trial were related to infants’ eye-gaze behavior, suggesting that LWL tasks capture knowledge about the labels of both objects tested, not just the label of the target object. The results suggest several critical methodological modifications that could be implemented to improve the measurement validity of both caregiver-report and eye-gaze measures of word comprehension.

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The last decade has seen an exponential rise in children's digital media use, as well as growing evidence that it is associated with changes in children's vocabulary. However, while high rates of low-quality digital media have been associated with lower amounts of words a child says, little work has examined whether digital media alters the types of words a child knows. Here, we explore whether differences in the amount of digital media exposure are associated with differences in the composition of children's vocabulary. The current study surveyed 388 caregivers of children 17–30 months (M = 23.9 months) on their children's productive vocabulary and technology use. Multiple regression models predicted the proportion of words children knew in different semantic categories based on the time they spent watching videos/TV, controlling for total noun vocabulary size, age, and income. Increased video watching was associated with producing a smaller proportion of body part words and more people and furniture words, but not other semantic categories. Increased video watching was not associated with differences in shape- or material-based nouns. The results suggest that differences in children's video watching are associated with differences in overall vocabulary size, but also with the particular types of words children know. This may have implications for supporting children's future language in a technology-filled world.

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