Children from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) earn lower grades, perform worse on achievement tests, and attain less education on average than their peers from higher-SES families. We evaluated neurocognitive mediators of SES disparities in achievement in a diverse sample of youth whose data were linked to administrative records of…

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language-switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese-English bilingual "returnee"…

Purpose: The aims of this study were to (a) determine if a high-quality adaptation of an audiovisual nonword repetition task can be completed by children with wide-ranging hearing abilities and to (b) examine whether performance on that task is sensitive to child demographics, hearing status, language, working memory, and executive function…

Theoretical accounts and experimental data on young children have shown that executive functions (EFs) are predicted by experiential factors. However, studies on school-aged children are rare. The present study has addressed this gap using a short-term cross-lagged longitudinal design focusing on the relationship between working memory (WM),…

The current study examined the effect of children's positive relationships and interactions with their teachers and the development of executive function (EF) skills in first grade. A primary objective was to examine externalizing behaviour problems (EBPs) as a potential moderator of the link between teacher-child relationships and interactions…

The authors investigated the roles of reading fluency in mediating and moderating the relation between executive functions and reading comprehension. Linguistically diverse students (n = 106) were assessed on multiple measures of reading fluency at the passage and word levels, reading comprehension, and executive functions in grade 7 and again in…

The purpose of this study was to examine which of the components of executive functions (EF)--inhibition, shifting, and working memory--predict reading and mathematics achievement and if the effects of these components are the same across two cultures (Western and East Asian). One hundred twenty English-speaking Canadian (65 females, 55 males;…

The current study investigated the long-term effects of institutionalization on the inhibitory control of young adults raised in orphanages using the color-word Stroop task. We examined whether young adults raised in institutions (IC group; n = 24; M = 22.17 years, SD = 6.7) would demonstrate poorer behavioral performance and atypical neural…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1),…

Executive attention, the attention necessary to reconcile conflict among simultaneous attentional demands, is vital to children's daily lives. This attention develops rapidly as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas mature during early and middle childhood. However, the developmental course of executive attention is not uniform among…

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests that the updating, inhibiting and shifting abilities underlying executive control are important for spoken language production in adults. However, little is known about this in children. Aims: To examine whether children with and without language impairment differ in all or only some of these executive…

This study provides the first analyses connecting individual differences in infant attention to reading achievement through the development of executive functioning (EF) in infancy and early childhood. Five-month-old infants observed a video, and peak look duration and shift rate were video coded and assessed. At 10 months, as well as 3, 4, and…

This study examined relations between children's false statements and response latency, executive functioning, and truth--lie understanding in order to understand what underlies children's emerging ability to make false statements. A total of 158 (2- to 5-year-old) children earned prizes for claiming that they were looking at birds even when…

To study the role of executive function (EF) in the early development of aggression, the role of cool and hot EF skills at 5 years old, in the development of physical and relational aggression between 5 and 6 years old, was explored. Typically developing children (N = 80) completed tasks assessing their cool (inhibition, working memory, planning)…

In 2002, Fan and his colleagues developed the Attention Network Test (ANT), a cognitive tool that provides a score for each of the attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive functioning). Since publication, this study has been cited over 3,500 times. The authors state one of the indicated uses of this tool is to measure how different…