Cross-situational word learning, the ability to decipher word-referent links over multiple ambiguous learning events, has been documented across development and proposed to be key to vocabulary acquisition. However, this work has largely focused on learning from one-to-one structure, where each referent is consistently linked with a single label.…

Intra-individual response time variability (IIRTV) during cognitive performance is increasingly recognized as an important indicator of attentional control (AC) and related brain region function. However, what determinants contribute to preschoolers' IIRTV received little attention. The present study explored the interaction of dopaminergic…

Preschool children naturally display competitive behavioral patterns. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the association between preschool children's regulation (regulatory and control components) and competitive behaviors (task-oriented and other-referenced). A total of 260 preschool children (47.7% girls) ranging in age from 49…

Previous research has shown that linguistic cues such as mental and modal verbs can influence young children's judgments about the reliability of informants. Further, certain languages include grammatical morphemes (i.e. evidential markers), which clarify the source of information coming from testimony (e.g., Bulgarian, Japanese, Turkish).…

Executive functions (EFs) in early childhood are predictors of later developmental outcomes and school readiness. Much of the research on EFs and their psychosocial correlates has been conducted in high-income, minority world countries, which represent a small and biased portion of children globally. The aim of this study is to examine EFs among…

The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age…

Previous research has shown that early numerical abilities are predictive of later mathematical achievement. In line with these previous studies, we investigated whether early numerical abilities are also associated with later probabilistic reasoning abilities. In the present study, we examined children's numerical abilities in the second grade of…

The association between pre-reading skills and phonological production skills has been shown at school age, but less is known about how these skills interact at an earlier age when they are just developing. The focus was to investigate whether a connection between pre-reading skills (letter naming, rapid automatised naming; RAN) and phonological…

Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a "novel…

Purpose: There is evidence suggesting that aerobic exercise immediately after vocabulary training can improve word recall in school-age children. This work examined whether the previously identified word-learning benefits associated with exercise can be extended to preschoolers. Additionally, we evaluated whether the effects of physical activity…

Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Our primary objective was to examine the extent to which moment-to-moment associations between preschool-aged children's behavior and maternal emotional support differed for mothers showing different levels of parasympathetic engagement. We used behavioral observations of maternal and child behavior and maternal changes in cardiac vagal tone…

Language and numerical development are associated in early childhood. In the present study, we focused on the association of the development of children's cardinality understanding of small numbers and their knowledge on unspecific quantifiers (i.e., many, a few). In a longitudinal study, we pursued the research question whether children's…

The development of (early) numerical cognition builds on children's ability to understand and manipulate quantities and numbers. However, previous research did not find conclusive evidence on the role of symbolic and non-symbolic skills in the development of (early) numerical cognition. The aim of the current study was to clarify the relation…

Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate…