Children with poor reading comprehension tend to have oral language weaknesses, suggesting that poor language in the early years is a proximal cause of later reading comprehension difficulties. Yet, longitudinal studies have not succeeded in reliably predicting which children go on to have comprehension weaknesses (CW), and evidence comprises…

From early in development, race biases how children think about gender--often in a manner that treats Black women as less typical and representative of "women in general" than White or Asian women. The present study (N = 89, ages 7-11; predominately Hispanic, White, and multi-racial children) examined the generalizability of this…

Differences in learning patterns of vocabulary acquisition in children at risk (+SRD) and not at risk (-SRD) for Specific Reading Disability (SRD) were examined using a microdevelopmental paradigm applied to the multi-trial Foreign Language Learning Task (FLLT; Baddeley et al., 1995). The FLLT was administered to 905 children from rural…

When asked to "find three forks", adult speakers of English use the noun "fork" to identify units for counting. However, when number words (e.g. "three") and quantifiers (e.g. "more", "every") are used with unfamiliar words ("Give me three blickets") noun-specific conceptual criteria are unavailable for picking out units. This poses a problem for…

It is well known that adults' face recognition is characterized by an "other-race effect" (ORE; see Meissner & Brigham, 2001), but few studies have investigated this ORE during the development of the face processing system. Here we examined the role of experience with other-race faces during childhood by testing a group of 6- to…

Minority-race children in North America and Europe often show less own-race favoritism than children of the majority (White) race, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unresolved. The present research tested South African children in order to probe the influences of group size, familiarity, and social status on children's race-based social…

We contend that previous work on children's identification with social groups has looked at the mere categorization of the self in group terms and not subjective identification properly conceived. Drawing upon self-categorization theory, the present research operationalizes identification as self-stereotyping (i.e. the ability to conceive of the…

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children, approximately 6 years old, attempted to identify the alternative image in a reversible figure. In both studies, bilingual children were more successful than monolinguals in seeing the other meaning in the images. In the first study, there was no relation between the ability to…

There is controversy over the basis for young children's experience of themselves and other people as separate yet related individuals, each with a mental perspective on the world--and over the nature of corresponding deficits in autism. Here we tested a form of self-other connectedness (identification) in children with and without autism, who…