Reading development involves several changes in orthographic processing. A key question is, "how does the coding of letters develops in children learning to read?" Masked priming effects of transposition and substitution primes have been taken to index the importance of letter position and identity coding. Somewhat contradicting results…

The present study longitudinally investigated proportional reasoning abilities in early elementary school before the start of its instruction. Three aims were put forward: (a) distinguishing the different developmental states in young children's understanding of missing-value proportional situations, (b) investigating how children transition…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

Millions of public-school students in the United States are identified as English language learners (ELLs), whose academic success is tied to their second language (L2) English education. Previous research in adult populations indicates that L2 proficiency is related to the contextual variable of the prevalence of one's first language (L1) among…

Evidence suggests that youth progressively experience mental health needs and discover mental health symptoms for the first time in adolescence. Schools have come to the forefront of providing mental health services, as adolescents spend most of their day in the academic setting. The current study aimed to examine individual and school-level…

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the trajectory of Spanish article accuracy in Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) from preschool to first grade, addressing the need for longitudinal data on the variability of Spanish grammatical skills in DLLs in English immersion classrooms. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted…

Executive attention, the attention necessary to reconcile conflict among simultaneous attentional demands, is vital to children's daily lives. This attention develops rapidly as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas mature during early and middle childhood. However, the developmental course of executive attention is not uniform among…

The current study investigated the development of children's performance on tasks that have been suggested to underlie early mathematics skills, including measures of cardinality, ordinality, and intelligence. Eighty-seven children were tested in their first (T1) and second (T2) school year (at ages 5 and 6). Children's performance on all tasks…

Longitudinal studies have steadily grown in popularity across the educational and behavioral sciences, particularly with the increased availability of technological devices that allow the easy collection of repeated measures on multiple dimensions of substantive relevance. This article discusses a procedure that can be used to evaluate population…

First-order theory of mind (ToM) development has shown to conform to a Guttman scale, with desire reasoning developing before belief reasoning. There have been attempts to test for internal consistency and scalability in advanced ToM, but not over a broad age range and only with a limited set of tasks. This 2-year longitudinal study (N = 155;…

Learners' self-initiated language learning with mobile technology occurring outside the classroom is often contextualized, heterogeneous, and idiosyncratic. In this study, we propose a time-series clustering methodology for researching informal mobile language learners' learning and development of another language, with a view to unravelling the…

Individual differences (IDs) have long been considered one of the most important factors explaining variable rates and outcomes in second language acquisition (Dewaele, 2013). While traditional operationalizations of IDs have, explicitly or implicitly, assumed that IDs are static traits that are stable through time, more recent research inspired…

Pointing has long been considered influential in language acquisition. Certain pre-linguistic vocal expressions may hold even greater value in addressing the transition to language. The goal of the present study is longitudinal evaluation of early communicative development, addressing the influence of pre-linguistic gestures and vocal expressions.…

Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…

Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of…