The present study explored developmental differences in preschoolers' use of reported speech and internal state language in personal narratives. Three-, four-, and five-year-olds attending a laboratory preschool shared 204 stories about 'a time when you were happy/sad'. Stories were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for reported speech…

Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new…

Knowing humor development can be rather beneficial in terms of providing opportunities to better know children and evaluate their development. This study aimed to explore the process of humor development in preschool and primary school children in line with McGhee's humor development theory. The study employed a single screening model,…

This study investigates the development of metapragmatic awareness in preschool children through the lens of Talmy's Force-Dynamics Model. Using conversation data from 60 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4 to 6, obtained from the International Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), the research employs a custom coding framework to analyze…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

It has been well documented in adults that compared to verbal learning, learning while the subject performs an action is far more effective. However, the results of previous studies involving children have not reached a consensus. The present study examined the action memory of 4- to 6-year-old children under various encoding conditions (i.e.,…

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of…

Behavioral and neuroscience research on boundary extension (false memory beyond the edges of a view of a scene) has provided new insights into the constructive nature of scene representation, and motivates questions about development. Early research with children (as young as 6-7 years) was consistent with boundary extension, but relied on an…

Evidence of longitudinal relations between language and early literacy skills in early childhood and later reading (and other) achievement is growing, along with an expanding array of early education programs designed to improve later academic outcomes and prevent, reduce, or close later academic achievement gaps across groups. Assessment systems…

The general gender discourse has currently revealed gender gaps as early as at preschool age. To analyze developmental differences between boys and girls in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, n = 4,251 preschoolers aged 48-83 months were examined by means of the 'Dortmund Developmental Screening for Preschools 3-6' (DESK 3-6). Using the…

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

In this study, 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (N=108) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which background context was manipulated. During the learning phase of each trial, children were presented with exemplars in one or multiple background contexts. At the test, children were asked to generalize to a novel exemplar in either the same…

Interactional coordination is important for conversational competence. For example, the syntactic form and rate of perceived speech can influence future productions in adults. Previous work has shown that children are similarly primed by syntax. This experiment demonstrates that syntactic priming and rate priming exist simultaneously in children.…

In Experiment 1, Japanese children (4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds (n = 78)) and adults (n = 36), answered questions about the possibility of psychogenic bodily reactions, i.e., bodily outcomes with origins in the mind. The 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers typically denied that bodily conditions could originate in mental states. Developmentally,…