Background: Learner-generated digital media has gained significant attention as a supplementary learning tool. However, a need exists for empirical research to discern among various learner-generated digital media formats. One potential area of divergence lies in the arousal levels evoked during media creation due to varying emphasis on the…

This study adopts a sociological perspective in investigating peer friendships, influenced by the new sociology of childhood and sociologists like Corsaro. Ten toddlers participated to the study which was conducted in two Greek day-care settings, using an adaptation of the Mosaic Approach. Children's interactions with their peers were investigated…

Background: Much is known about the positive effects of teachers' self-efficacy on instruction and student outcomes, but the processes underlying these relations are unknown. Aims: We aimed to examine the effects of teacher self-efficacy for student engagement (TSESE) before a lesson on teachers' nonverbal immediacy (NVI) and their enthusiastic…

This study explored cognitive effects on narrative macrostructure in both languages of 38 Russian-German bilinguals aged 4;6 to 5;1‚ while controlling for demographic factors (sex, socioeconomic status) and language proficiency. Macrostructure was operationalised as story structure (SS) and story complexity (SC) using the Multilingual Assessment…

Maternal mind-mindedness, which examines mothers' representational capacity to treat their children as individuals with their own minds, has traditionally been operationalized by coding mothers' mental state comments to or about their children. Mind-mindedness has been studied predominantly in Western cultures, where it predicts children's…

Exposure to communicative gestures, through their parents' use of gestures, is associated with infants' language development. However, the mechanisms supporting this link are not fully understood. In adults, sensorimotor brain activity occurs while processing communicative stimuli, including both spoken language and gestures. Using…

Deaf and hearing adults perceive faces differently. This study investigates whether these differences are acquired during childhood development. We characterized facial perception in deaf and hearing children aged 7-17 using a perceptual discrimination task. Configural and featural information was manipulated in the eye and mouth facial regions.…

In spite of the close relationship between gestures and expressive language, little research has examined the roles of the parents' and children's gestures in the development of expressive language abilities in autistic children. Previous findings are also inconclusive. In the present study, we coded the gestures produced by the parents and their…

Social and emotional competencies (SEC) are critical for success in school and life, as they include the ability to interact with others, regulate one's emotions and behavior, solve problems, and communicate effectively. Research and practice show that dance experiences enhance social-emotional development, yet less is known about the mechanisms…

Extended reality technologies such as headset-based augmented reality (AR) unlock unique opportunities to integrate gestures into the collaborative problem-solving process. The following qualitative study documents the collection and analysis of group interaction data in an astronomy sky simulation across AR and tablet technologies in a classroom…

The study examined the moderating role of children's affect-biased attention to angry, fearful, and sad adult faces in the link between interparental conflict and children's distinct forms of involvement. Participants included 243 preschool children (M[subscript age] = 4.60 years, 56% female) and their parents from racially (48% African American,…

Advancement in the fields of emotion regulation and performance in learning settings has developed our collective understanding of how affective stimuli modulate emotional responses of learners who are engaging in learning tasks. Studies in the application of background music during cognitively demanding tasks have led to a continued study of how…

Metaphors in gesture and speech play a pivotal role in the way that programming concepts are presented in the classroom. However, little is known about the function of teachers' metaphors in practice. This study aims to explore teachers' use of metaphors in gesture and speech in a lecture on programming. Based on video observations of three upper…

Dialogic reading (DR), first described in Whitehurst et al. (1988), is a specific reading technique that encourages parents to involve the child actively in verbal and nonverbal interactions during shared book reading. The well-known acronyms for DR techniques include CROWD (completion, recall, open-ended questions, wh-questions and distancing)…

Objective: It has been observed that toddlers tend to miscategorize several negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger). On the other hand, when we infer others' emotions, an approach-avoidance tendency toward facial expressions is perceived antecedently before linguistically categorizing them into emotion-word-based categories, such as sadness,…