This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic…

The size of an individual's phonological similarity effect for visually presented material is assumed to reflect his or her ability to recode, and by implication rehearse, information in verbal short-term memory. Many studies have shown that under these conditions, the size of this effect interacts with age, tending to be nonsignificant in…

Role-play (i.e., pretending in which children imagine and act out the part of another individual) was assessed with child interviews and parent questionnaires about invisible friends, personified objects, and pretend identities in a sample of 208 young children. Children who engaged in role-play did not differ from other children in age or…

Early in development, many word-learning phenomena generalize to symbolic gestures. The current study explored whether children avoid lexical overlap in the gestural modality, as they do in the verbal modality, within the context of ambiguous reference. Eighteen-month-olds' interpretations of words and symbolic gestures in a symbol-disambiguation…

Infants require locomotor experience to behave adaptively at a drop-off. However, different experimental paradigms (visual cliff and actual gaps and slopes) have generated conflicting findings regarding what infants learn and the specificity of their learning. An actual, adjustable drop-off apparatus was used to investigate whether learning to…

During infant development, objects and their functions are learned by means of active exploration. Factors that may influence exploration include reaching and grasping ability, object properties and the presence of developmental disorders. We assessed the development of exploratory actions in 16 typically-developing (TD) infants and 9 infants with…

Quality in early childhood settings has emerged as an important factor in determining whether the potential benefits of educational experiences before kindergarten will be realized. Research demonstrates that in order for such interventions to be beneficial to young children's development, the quality of their educational environments and…

The purpose of this case study was to investigate what impact the child development associate (CDA) credential has on the performance of childcare providers in the 6 CDA competency areas. Each participant was interviewed using 9 open-ended questions regarding their experience. Over the past few years, a number of studies have examined the effects…

The articles in this special issue make clear that the field of early education is characterized by a breadth and depth of knowledge unimaginable 200 years ago, even to someone as exceptional as Elizabeth Peabody. This radical feminist used early 19th-century ideas of the "woman's sphere" to suggest that a career in early childhood education was…

A basic assumption in psychotherapy with children is that the parent-child relationship is central to the child's development. This article describes the Joint Painting Procedure, an art-based assessment for evaluating relationships with respect to the two main developmental tasks of middle childhood: (a) the parent's ability to monitor and…

The field of developmental psychology has produced abundant theory and research about the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development of children; however, to date there has been limited use of this wealth of knowledge by developers creating games for children. This chapter provides an overview of key theoretical observations and…

This article addresses the issue of the plurality of theories and perspectives in education research, and introduces postperspectival theory as a means to work with this plurality. Three pieces of research are discussed, all focusing on children's learning of numbers, one taking a cognitivist perspective, the other two a more sociocultural…

The aim of this paper is to analyse the attitudes of Estonian primary school teachers and parents regarding the role of mutual digital communication in socialising the child and in the child's academic progress, their communication channel preferences, and related experiences and opinions. The main starting points are Bronfenbrenner's (1979)…

Three studies examined the communication of naïve theories of social groups in conversations between parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 48). Parent-child dyads read and discussed a storybook in which they either explained why past social interactions had occurred (Study 1) or evaluated whether future social interactions should occur…

Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, "-paq", that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The…