Persuasion skills consist of a complex concoction of specific mental, emotional, and social abilities. Interest in this topic continues to grow; however, there remains limited knowledge on social and cognitive correlates of persuasion in childhood. The present study explores the interrelations among specific cognitive abilities, social skills, and…

Purpose: Researchers have developed a constellation model of decodingrelated reading disabilities (RD) to improve the RD risk determination. The model's hallmark is its inclusion of various RD indicators to determine RD risk. Classification methods such as logistic regression (LR) might be one way to determine RD risk within the constellation…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

In this study, we explore the interconnectedness between children's creativity, social play, and language abilities. The participants were 225 (109 girls, 116 boys) preschool children, from diverse European American, African American, and Hispanic ethnic heritages. We assessed the children in three ways. First, each child completed the Goodenough…

The concept of Matthew effects in reading development refers to a longitudinally widening gap between high achievers and low achievers. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to examine this idea. However, little attention has been paid to psychometric issues of scaling. Specifically, interval-level data are required to compare…

This article examines associations between observed quality in preschool center classrooms for approximately 6,250 three- to five-year-olds and their school readiness skills at kindergarten entry. Secondary analyses were conducted using data from four large-scale studies to estimate the effects of preschool center quality and interactions between…

The present paper was written under the auspices of the interdisciplinary research group "Educational Processes, Competence Development, and Selection Decisions at Preschool and Primary School Age (BiKS)" (FOR 543), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The surveys were conceptualised and supervised as part of the developmental…

The goal of this study was to compare the literacy skills of adult native English and native Spanish ABE speakers. Participants were 169 native English speakers and 124 native Spanish speakers recruited from five prior research projects. The results showed that the native Spanish speakers were less skilled on morphology and passage comprehension…

The research investigated the hypothesis that teachers' ratings of kindergarten children's receptive and expressive language ability would be related to children's social competence. Teachers' ratings of social competence were obtained for a sample of 116 kindergarten children. Social competence was measured using the California Preschool Social…

Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

Recent advances in methods and computer software for longitudinal data analysis have pushed researchers to more critically examine developmental theories. In turn, researchers have also begun to push longitudinal methods by asking more complex developmental questions. One such question involves the relationships between two developmental…

The purpose of this study was to replicate and slightly refine and extend the procedures of Houston and Otto, who pointed out the need for studying the relationship between easily administered, individual measures of intelligence with more diagnostic and more highly validated measures. (Author/RK)

Current research indicates the possible influence of IE development on cognitive development. Efforts are being made to identify behaviors by which parents or teachers can increase development of internal control expectancies in preschool children. Studies correlating children's IE scores with various mother behaviors or mother-child interaction…

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and…