Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) programs in many Ontario colleges offer adult learners who have low literacy and basic skills with opportunities to improve their employment skills as well as results on prerequisite courses for entrance into post-secondary education. LBS students encounter many challenges and require extra interpersonal…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

The study examined the etiology of individual differences in early drawing and of its longitudinal association with school mathematics. Participants (N = 14,760), members of the Twins Early Development Study, were assessed on their ability to draw a human figure, including number of features, symmetry, and proportionality. Human figure drawing was…

A large body of research has documented changes in self-esteem across adulthood and individual-difference correlates thereof. However, little is known about whether people maintain their self-esteem until the end of life and what role key risk factors in the health, cognitive, self-regulatory, and social domains play. To examine these questions,…

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to…

The stability of callous-unemotional (CU) traits and both individual and contextual factors that influence this stability have been studied in community adolescent samples but not to great extent in adolescents who have been arrested. We estimated the developmental changes in CU traits measured over the course of 36 months (6-month intervals)…

The purpose of this study is to examine the correlation between Teachers' Self-efficacy beliefs, locus of control and intercultural sensitivities and to analyze these variables based on various demographic variables. The data of the study were collected through teachers' locus of control scale developed by Sadowski, Taylor, Woodward, Peacher,…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe the development of inferential abilities of children age 3 to 6 years in a narrative using a dialogic reading task on an iPad. Method: Participants were 121 typically developing children, divided into 3 groups according to age range (3-4 years old, 4-5 years old, 5-6 years old). Total score of inferential…

Linking relations described in text with relations in visualizations is often difficult. We used eye tracking to measure the optimal way to extract such relations in graphs, college students, and young children (6- and 8-year-olds). Participants compared relational statements ("Are there more blueberries than oranges?") with simple…

A new test of children's flexible use of semantic cues for word learning extended previous results. In Experiment 1, three- to five-year-olds (N = 51) completed two tests of interpreting several novel words for the same stimulus arrays. Within-sentence phrasal cues implied different stimulus referent properties. Children's cue-using…

Purpose: This study examined individual differences in English language learners' (ELLs) nonword repetition (NWR) accuracy, focusing on the effects of age, English vocabulary size, length of exposure to English, and first-language (L1) phonology. Method: Participants were 75 typically developing ELLs (mean age 5;8 [years;months]) whose exposure to…

Purpose: Background noise can interfere with our ability to understand speech. Working memory capacity (WMC) has been shown to contribute to the perception of speech in modulated noise maskers. WMC has been assessed with a variety of auditory and visual tests, often pertaining to different components of working memory. This study assessed the…