Latino children are the fastest growing minority group in the United States and in order to best serve this population we need research to inform educators on specific cultural strengths that can be fostered and developed. Despite the known academic achievement gap between Latino children and their non-Latino peers, ecocultural strength based…

Bilingual experience has an impact on an individual's linguistic processing and general cognitive abilities. The relation between these linguistic and non-linguistic domains, in turn, is mediated by individual linguistic proficiency and developmental changes that take place across the lifespan. This study evaluated this relationship by assessing…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

Bilingual children often show advanced executive functioning (EF) and false belief (FB) understanding compared to monolinguals. The latter has been attributed to their enhanced inhibitory control EF, although this has only been examined in a single study which did not confirm this hypothesis. The current study examined the relation of EF and…

Head Start is a national program that aims to promote school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social, and other services to enrolled children and families. The program places special emphasis on helping preschoolers develop the reading, language,…

Deception is a controversial aspect of theory of mind, and researchers disagree about whether it entails an understanding of the false beliefs of one's opponent. The present study asks whether children with delayed language and delayed explicit false belief reasoning can succeed on explicit deception tasks. Participants were 45 orally taught deaf…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine the potential contribution of teacher-child interactions to residualized Inhibitory Control (IC) gains over approximately a six-month period for preschoolers from predominantly low-income households. The study also explored whether the association between quality of teacher-child…

This cohort-sequential study explored the components of working memory (WM) that underlie second language (L2) reading growth in 450 children at risk and not at risk for reading disabilities (RD) whose first language is Spanish. English language learners designated as balanced and nonbalanced bilinguals with and without risk for RD in Grades 1, 2,…

Preschoolers' inhibitory control and early math skills were concurrently and longitudinally examined in 255 Chinese, African American, Dominican, and Mexican 4-year-olds in the United States. Inhibitory control at age 4, assessed with a peg-tapping task, was associated with early math skills at age 4 and predicted growth in such skills from age 4…