This study analyzed the performance and growth in letter knowledge and letter identification skills of children across an academic year. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted on letter name knowledge measures administered at three time points for all participating children (N = 177) and seven time points for children (n = 106)…

Family plays a very important role in infant's development and behaviour, being that the parents' divorce can be a very stressful experience. This is an exploratory and comparative study that aims at identifying the differences in children's behaviour with divorced parents (or separated) and married parents (or living together), based on the…

There appears to be a close and probably causal relationship between early variations in phoneme skills and later reading skills in typically developing children, though the pattern in children with Down Syndrome is less clear. We present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 49 children with Down Syndrome (DS) and 61 typically developing…

Associations between early deprivation and memory functioning were examined in 9- to 11-year-old children. Children who had experienced prolonged institutional care prior to adoption were compared to children who were adopted early from foster care and children reared in birth families. Measures included the Paired Associates Learning task from…

There is some evidence for sex differences in habituation in the human fetus, but it is unknown whether this is due to differences in central processing (habituation) or in more peripheral processes, sensory or motor, involved in the response. This study examined whether the sex of the fetus influenced auditory habituation at 33 weeks of…

Objectives: Using baseline and second wave data, the study evaluated the measurement and structural properties of parenting stress, personal mastery, and economic strain with N = 381 lower income parents who decided to join and those who did not join in a child development savings account program. Methods: Structural equation modeling mean and…

Little is known about slow-to-warm-up temperament in infancy. This study examined the trajectory of shyness in children who were slow-to-warm-up in infancy in comparison to children with other temperament profiles in infancy. Participants were 996 mothers and children in the NICHD SECC studied from 6 months to first grade. Latent growth curve…

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with…

Background: Depression in adolescence is common and early onset predicts worse outcome in adulthood. Studies in adults have suggested a link between higher total 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations and lower risk of depression. Objectives: To investigate (a) the association between serum 25(OH)D[subscript 2] and 25(OH)D[subscript 3]…

We investigated whether the interpretation of auditory stimuli as speech or non-speech affects audiovisual (AV) speech integration at the neural level. Perceptually ambiguous sine-wave replicas (SWS) of natural speech were presented to listeners who were either in "speech mode" or "non-speech mode". At the behavioral level, incongruent lipread…

The author draws on her own experiences through art, along with her experiences with children, to inform her understanding of art making as nomadic thinking, a means to disrupt the power structures and boundaries that developmental psychology imposes on early childhood practice. The author altered the classrooms of two early childhood centres with…

Purpose: To understand the components of auditory learning in typically developing children by assessing generalization across stimuli, across modalities (i.e., hearing, vision), and to higher level language tasks. Method: Eighty-six 8- to 10-year-old typically developing children were quasi-randomly assigned to 4 groups. Three of the groups…

This study investigated the developmental variability of lip and tongue movement in 48 children and adults. Motion of the tongue-tip, tongue-body and lower lip was recorded using electromagnetic articulography during productions of sentences containing /t/, /s/, /l/, /k/ and /p/. Four groups of speakers participated in the study: (1) aged 6-7…

Category-based induction requires selective use of different relations to guide inferences; this article examines the development of inferences based on ecological relations among living things. Three hundred and forty-six 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children from rural, suburban, and urban communities projected novel "diseases" or "insides" from one…

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, the present study tested whether the benefits of a marital birth for early child development diminish as parents' risk of having a nonmarital birth increases (N = 2,285). It was hypothesized that a child's likelihood of being born to unmarried parents is partly a function of father…