This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) has robust associations with psychopathology. As such, understanding the development of AMS (or its inverse, overgeneral autobiographical memory) and how it may be unique from other aspects of memory performance is important. In particular, it is unclear whether child AMS is distinct from…

When children are confronted with an emotional problem, affective flexibility mobilizes their cognitive and emotional resources to optimally address it. We investigated the contribution of executive functions to cognitive and affective flexibility in preschoolers. We assessed affective flexibility in 67 preschoolers (30 girls; M[subscript months]…

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

The decision to intentionally withhold truthful information, or deception, is a key component of moral development and may be a precursor to more serious anti-social tendencies. Two factors, executive function (EF) and temperamental fear are each thought to influence childhood deception. Few studies, however, have explored deception in relation to…

We examined how maternal strategic behaviors during a mother-child collaborative sort-recall task of categorically similar items related to children's recall and children's strategic behavior in a sort-recall task that they completed independently. Mother-child dyads participated in the collaborative sort-recall task when children were 40 months…

Although emerging evidence suggests that parental behavior is related to the development of child executive functioning (EF), the mechanisms through which parenting affects child EF have yet to be investigated. The goal of this study was to examine the potential mediating role of child language in the prospective relation between maternal autonomy…

We examined the performance of sequential bilingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI), who had Spanish as an L1 and English as their L2, on an auditory non-word repetition task using Spanish phonotactic patterns. We also analyzed the accuracy with which this task distinguished these children (according to children's and…

Mental state language during conversations about the past was assessed in a short-term longitudinal study. Twenty-one mother-child dyads discussed several previously experienced events when the children were 30 and 42 months old. Over time, children's mental term use--although quite low--did increase, and both mothers and children talked more…