Anxiety has been associated with social communication and interaction differences among autistic children. We sought to clarify the direction of these associations longitudinally, and test executive function as a moderator. Participants were autistic children (N = 157; 15% female, 85% male) engaged in a longitudinal study. Analyses focused on two…

This study evaluates the effectiveness of an existing Executive Function (EF) intervention, implemented by teachers in Italian preschools. While early EF development has received significant attention, few studies have explored the impact of brief, teacher-led EF interventions in educational settings. The study included an intervention group (n =…

Purpose: To investigate the language environments experienced by preterm-born infants, this study compared the linguistic and interactive features of parent--infant conversations involving 2-year-old preterm- and term-born infants. The study also explored how mother-infant and father-infant conversations may be differentially affected by…

Children develop their language capacities and executive functions (EF) throughout their school-aged years. Research has shown that bilingual children show different patterns of EF performance when compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, it is less clear how variations in children's multilingual experiences associate with variation in…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are…

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the main components of role play, according to Vygotsky (object substitution, idea of play, play interaction), and executive functions (working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, planning) in preschool age. The study involved 56 children, 5 to 6 years old (29 boys and 27…

Nowadays, classrooms include children coming from a wide range of cultures and speaking different languages. Teachers are therefore challenged to create appropriate learning opportunities for very diverse children. The current study examined the unique contribution of general classroom interaction, individual teacher-child interactions and…

There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Parenting is a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral endeavor, where parents' control capacities, including executive functions and active control coping, help parents to guide and regulate interactions with their children; yet limited research investigates how these capacities are associated with parent-child affective regulation processes during…

As children with autism spectrum disorder become adults, social participation continues to be an area of need. Within creative arts, there is a growing body of literature about the use of theatre arts, improvisational theatre, and improvisational techniques as a way to address social participation for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. The…

Research on the screen time of young children and its relationship to their cognitive and social development is controversial. Based on a stratified, random sample of 579 five-year-old children in Guangdong, China, this study explores the relationship between the screen time of Chinese children and their cognitive and social development.…

The current study examines the contributions of family context (e.g. life events, home environments) to low-income preschool children's self-regulation (behaviour regulation and executive function) in the United States and Turkey. Participants were 1139 low-income children (486 from the U.S. and 653 from Turkey) and their parents. Children's…

Quality of teacher-child interactions is central to prekindergarten children's learning. In the United States, the quality of teacher-child interactions is commonly assessed using the teaching through interactions conceptual framework and an associated observational tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). This study examined: (a)…

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work has been attempting to answer the questions of how and how much of the effects of children's early experience may depend on their inner characteristics. Theory and evidence suggest that some children, notably those with difficult temperaments, are more susceptible to both negative and positive…

Communications studies and psychology offer analytical and methodological tools that when combined have the potential to bring novel perspectives on human interaction with technologies. In this study of children using simple and complex mathematics applications on tablet computers, cognitive load theory is used to answer the question: how…