Introduction: Growing up in poverty increases children's exposure to adversities that undermine healthy development, impeding growth in the social-emotional and language skills that support adaptive coping and promote mental health (Yoshikawa et al., 2012). Head Start promotes preschool gains but benefits fade as children proceed into elementary…

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which…

Children often encounter events that bear on their moral and other evaluations, such as physical aggression and material disorder. Children's perceptions and evaluations are decisive for how they respond to and learn from these everyday events. Using a new method for investigating the development of social perceptions and evaluations, researchers…

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4-5 and adults) explore patterns of age-related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., "scientist"). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category-normative traits, and the two were…

Taika Waititi's recent film 'Hunt for the Wilderpeople' (2016) portrays the coming-of-age of a young boy, Ricky, in a world with few recognisably responsible adults. While the film does not engage explicitly with formal education, it raises several questions central for understanding education as formation, highlighting the generational aspects of…

The influence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the developing child across several domains of functioning has much theoretical and empirical support. Yet, surprisingly, the impact of ACEs on the development of language skills specifically remains somewhat understudied. The present report provides a brief review of research on ACEs and…

Past research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events--a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical…

Accurately remembering how and when one's own learning occurs is an important metacognitive skill that matures during the early school years. In two studies, the impact of a delay on this ability was examined. In Study 1, 30 children in two age groups (4-year-olds and 5-year-olds) participated in two-staged learning events and were interviewed…

Purpose: The particular statistical approach researchers choose is intimately connected to the way they conceptualize their questions, which, in turn, can influence the conclusions they draw. One particularly salient area in which statistics influence our conclusions is in the context of atypical development. Traditional statistical approaches…

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. "The boy lorped the cat"), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. "feed") (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, [Yuan, S.,…

The implicit and explicit messages early childhood practitioners send about disability have important consequences for young children's developing identities and sense of belonging. The authors discuss how practitioners can cultivate early learning communities in which the identities of all young children, with and without disabilities, are…

In looking back to childhood, and what constituted daily life, a case is made for unique ways of knowing that unfold through play, place, and tradition. A closer look at the relationship between childhood memory and the particularities of place, suggests that adult creativity, a sense of psychological stability, and an attitude of wonder, even…

This study used an ethological approach to explore the behavioural adaptation of nineteen infants during their first six weeks in Residential Care (RC), or a Foster Family (FF) or an Infant-Mother Centre (IMC). Direct observations were conducted once a week at bath time. Observed behaviours were: sleep-wake states, visual exploration, motor…

The authors propose decentering the child as a critical motion in the education of pedagogists who work to refuse developmental pedagogies in early childhood education. Tracing how child-centered developmental practices are obstacles for deeper ethical and intellectual work and reiterate anthropocentric relationalities, they offer two propositions…

Infants and toddlers spend a substantial amount of their time in out-of-home care, and are thus being tended to not only by their mothers but also by their caregivers. It is therefore of considerable importance to study the effects of caregiver-infant compared to mother-infant interactions. To address this issue, first, various variables of…