The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations among children's symbolic functioning at 15 months, joint attention at 24 months, expressive communication at 24 and 36 months, and executive functioning at 36 months. With the sample from rural areas in the United States collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,008), a longitudinal data…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

Language assessment is increasingly computermediated. This development presents opportunities with new task formats and equally a need for renewed scrutiny of established conventions. Recent recommendations to increase integrated skills assessment in lecture comprehension tests is premised on empirical research that demonstrates enhanced construct…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…

Background: Factors influencing the implementation of communication partner training (CPT) with familiar partners of people with aphasia (PWA) have previously been documented using disparate approaches. To date there has been no synthesis of these factors using a common theoretical framework. Investigating CPT implementation factors using a common…

Working memory (WM) is highly predictive of academic performance, and individual differences in WM can already be observed in early childhood. However, obtaining accurate measures of WM in kindergarten-aged children is labour intensive. From an intervention perspective, identifying correlates of WM that are more readily measured can help identify…

Visuospatial processing speed underlies several cognitive functions critical for successful completion of everyday tasks, including driving and walking. While it is widely accepted that visuospatial processing speed peaks in early adulthood, performance across the lifespan remains incompletely characterized. Additionally, there remains a lack of…

Parenting has a prominent role in predicting children's externalizing behaviors (EB). Although parenting behavior has been shown by prior research to mediate the relationship between parenting self-efficacy (PSE) as the cognitive aspect of parenting and child EB, the role of children's cognitive aspects in the relationship is not yet well…

Within the framework of the theory of visual attention (TVA), the visual attention span (VAS) deficit among individuals with developmental dyslexia has been ascribed to the problems entailed by bottom-up (BotU) and top-down (TopD) attentional processes. The former involves two VAS subcomponents: the visual short-term memory storage and perceptual…

Background: In several countries, children's math skills have been declining at an alarming rate in recent years and decades, and one of the explanations for this alarming situation is that children have difficulties in establishing the relations between arithmetical operations. Aim: In order to address this question, our goal was to determine the…

We studied the role of sensorimotor and working memory systems in supporting development of perceptual rhythm processing with 119 participants aged 7-12 years. Children were assessed for their abilities in sensorimotor synchronization (SMS; beat tapping), auditory working memory (AWM; digit span), and rhythm discrimination (RD; same/different…

Cultural contexts influence the development of self-regulation. However, cross-cultural variations and consistencies in different aspects of self-regulation and their academic outcomes within the Asian context are less clear. This study investigated (1) the extent to which the development of hot and cool Executive Function (EF) might differ among…

Humans are continuously making sense of the world. One way we do this is with intuitive frameworks, which are ad-hoc, informal patterns of thinking about natural and social phenomena. However, there is mixed evidence about the utility of intuitive frameworks in formal learning settings, especially in science education. Some research has shown that…

It is important to consider the two parameters of signal detection theory, discriminability and response bias, when evaluating eyewitness identification from simultaneous lineups. On the basis of the diagnostic feature-detection hypothesis, we tested a method for increasing discriminability that encourages eyewitnesses to carefully rank each…

Previous research by the authors found that mental toughness, as measured by the Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48 (MTQ48; Clough, P.J., Earle, K., & Sewell, D. [2002]. Mental toughness: the concept and its measurement. In I. Cockerill (Ed.), Solutions in sport psychology [pp. 32-43]. London: Thomson Publishing), was significantly associated…