Identifying and understanding the predictors of preliteracy skills can set the stage for success in a child's academic career. Recent literature has implicated social-emotional competence as a potential component in helping children learn preliteracy skills. To further understand the role of social-emotional competence in preliteracy, the…

Interesting systems, whether biological or artificial, develop. Starting from some initial conditions, they respond to environmental changes, and continuously improve their capabilities. Developmental psychologists have dedicated significant effort to studying the developmental progression of infant imitation skills, because imitation underlies…

This manuscript by Connell and Frye ("Infant Child Dev" 2006; 15(6): 609-621) provides a clear example of the application of latent growth mixture models (LGMM) to the development of antisocial behaviour in adolescence. The LGMM approach is discussed in the context of this example, and factors influencing the results achieved with these methods…

Despite the increasing use of the microgenetic methodology to examine change, the techniques employed to analyse microgenetic data remain fairly unsophisticated. This paper reviews the existing ways of analysing such data and describes their limitations. We use two recent studies to illustrate how modelling can avoid these problems and reveal…