This study explores the cognitive development of children born to adolescent mothers within South Africa compared to existing reference data, and explores development by child age bands to examine relative levels of development. Cross-sectional analyses present data from 954 adolescents (10-19 years) and their first-born children (0-68 months).…

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this…

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the…

This special issue is dedicated to research that adopts the microgenetic method in order to investigate change as it is happening. In this commentary we reflect on the diversity of the articles included in this special issue, and examine how the findings from these articles relate to five critical features of change: path, rate, breadth,…

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…