This is a summary of research findings from a piece of qualitative research conducted between May and July 2010 for the National Literacy Trust to inform the Talk To Your Baby campaign. The objectives of the research were to identify motivating messages to encourage parents to communicate with their children under three, and to understand key ways…

Teaching and learning in kindergarten is related, on the one hand, to the principles, methods and forms of teachers' work that should optimally contribute to pre-school child development and learning, and on the other hand, to the issues of the developing their reasoning and other aspects of their personality. It is for this reason that the…

Subordinate-level category-learning processes in infants were investigated with ERP and looking-time measures. ERPs were recorded while 6- to 7-month-olds were presented with Saint Bernard images during familiarization, followed by novel Saint Bernards interspersed with Beagles during test. In addition, infant looking times were measured during a…

Does early gesture use predict later productive and receptive vocabulary in children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL)? Eleven children with PL were categorized into 2 groups based on whether their gesture at 18 months was within or below the range of typically developing (TD) children. Children with PL whose gesture was within…

This study analyzed German and Nso mothers' auditory, proximal, and visual contingent responses to their infants' nondistress vocalizations in postnatal Weeks 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Visual contingency scores increased whereas proximal contingency scores decreased over time for the independent (German urban middle-class, N = 20) but not the…

Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a character's mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct…

This study investigated whether one hundred and thirty-five 3- to 6-year-old children exhibit a yes bias to various yes-no questions and whether their knowledge status affects the production of a yes bias. Three-year-olds exhibited a yes bias to all yes-no questions such as "preference-object" and "knowledge-object" questions pertaining to…

This study examines some characteristics of the outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartens. Understood as pedagogical space, outdoor conditions may enhance or restrict the youngest children's possibilities for play, learning and development. In 117 of 133 kindergartens (response rate: 87 %) participating in a longitudinal study, the heads of…

In the process of children's talent development, fathers have been largely ignored compared to mothers who are mostly identified as the initial and primary influence for their children. Though modern fathers are becoming more engaged in childrearing and interacting more with their children and changes in family systems lead to new challenges and…

Numeric magnitudes often bias adults' spatial performance. Partly because the direction of this bias (left-to-right versus right-to-left) is culture-specific, it has been assumed that the orientation of spatial-numeric associations is a late development, tied to reading practice or schooling. Challenging this assumption, we found that preschoolers…

Prior research has demonstrated intersensory facilitation for perception of amodal properties of events such as tempo and rhythm in early development, supporting predictions of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (IRH). Specifically, infants discriminate amodal properties in bimodal, redundant stimulation but not in unimodal, nonredundant…

This is a relational scan study aiming to question the relationship between rhythm skills which are the most fundamental element in musical development and mathematics ability. Also within the general aims of the study is to examine whether this relationship varies with respect to the personal characteristics of 5-6 year olds. It has been…

This study aims to examine the effects of Family Supported Preschool Education programs on the development of preschool children. By measuring the effects of family-supported preschool education on cognitive development, this study helps support alternative methods of making preschool education more widespread. The study uses the experimental…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine how between-language interaction contributes to phonological acquisition in bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. Method: A total of 24 typically developing children, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 4;0, were included in this study: 8 bilingual Spanish-English speaking children, 8…

Reaching and grasping skills have been described to emerge from a dynamic interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The aims of the study were to investigate the effect of such intrinsic factors as age and Down syndrome on the development of reaching and grasping skills and on overall gross motor skill, and to test the influence of the…