Showing papers in "Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2014"

TL;DR: A multifaceted model of children's early numeracy environment, with different types of early home experiences (formal and informal) predicting different numeracy outcomes is supported.

TL;DR: The authors examined relations between symbolic and non-symbolic numerical magnitude representations, between whole number and fraction representations, and between these representations and overall mathematics achievement in fifth graders, and found that the relation was much stronger for symbolic numbers.

TL;DR: It was found that the bilingual Turkish-Dutch children showed cognitive gains in visuospatial and verbal working memory tests when SES and vocabulary were controlled, in particular on tests that require processing and not merely storage.

TL;DR: Investigation of the influence of executive function (EF) and spatial skills, two generalizable skills often overlooked in mathematics curricula, on mathematics performance in preschoolers indicates that both skills are part of an important foundation for mathematics performance and may represent pathways for improving school readiness for mathematics.

TL;DR: The results suggest that infants' attentional abilities may be an important factor in facilitating their social attention early in development.

TL;DR: Results indicated that fraction magnitude knowledge, and not whole number knowledge, was especially related to students' pretest knowledge of equation solving and encoding of equation features, and was also predictive of students' improvement in equation solve and equation encoding skills.

TL;DR: Results indicated that working memory has a specific relation to only a few-but critically important-early mathematics skills and language has a broad relation to nearly all early mathematics skills.

TL;DR: The training group outperformed the control group on emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and the positive training outcomes for emotion understanding remained stable over 6 months.

TL;DR: Results demonstrate that across age groups, explanation promotes causal learning and generalization but does not improve (and in younger children can even impair) memory for causally irrelevant perceptual details.

TL;DR: The findings indicate that children's efficiency to process symbols is important for the development of their arithmetic fluency in Grade 1 above and beyond the influence of non-numerical factors.

TL;DR: It is discovered that Singaporean children's math-gender stereotypes increased as a function of age and that boys identified with math more strongly than did girls despite Singaporean girls' excelling in math.

TL;DR: A conversation-based training program for 9- and 10-year-olds showed significantly greater gains in ToM than the control group; this contrast was stable over 2 months, and (in a subsample) the improvement was independent of any changes in executive functions.

TL;DR: Domain-general skills that mediate the relation between kindergarten number sense and first-grade mathematics skills were investigated and showed that both attention problems and executive functioning were unique predictors of mathematics outcomes.

TL;DR: Results support the view that some metacognitive judgments may be acted on with greater ease than others among young children, and suggest robust metac cognitive monitoring skills in children as young as 5 years.

TL;DR: Children's empathic tendencies predicted their intention to help and that the context as well as recipients' group membership had no effects, but when the need was relatively high, empathy appeared to outweigh children's group norm considerations.

TL;DR: The results lead to the conclusion that both mothers and fathers contribute through their child-rearing behavior to their children's executive functioning, even when controlling for age-related improvement (maturation) and important covariates such as gender, verbal IQ, and place of enrollment.

TL;DR: The results suggest that children value procedural justice increasingly during middle childhood and that their fairness concerns may be more about avoiding partiality than inequity per se.

TL;DR: This study tested 5- to 7-year-old children's cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents, and demonstrated that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance.

TL;DR: Mothers' use of appropriate mind-related comments specifically during toy-based free play at 12 months of age predicted preschoolers' understanding of false belief and Level 2 visual perspective taking over and above earlier perspective-taking abilities.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the results of these tasks in 3- to 5-year-olds are best interpreted as resulting from the combination of two mechanisms: basic skills of argument evaluations that process the content of arguments, allowing children as young as 3 years to favor non-circular arguments over circular arguments, and a heuristic that leads older children to give some weight to circular arguments.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that preschoolers' sharing behavior is enhanced by their ToM understanding and explicit communicative cues provided by the playmate.

TL;DR: Results from the current study support the notion that parent and infant responses in the SFP with mothers and fathers during Bowlby's attachment in the making phase provide insight into the developing parent-child attachment relationship.

TL;DR: Tasks measuring EC were best described by a single factor and not distinct hot and cool factors, indicating that affective salience alone does not differentiate between hot andCool EC.

TL;DR: It is concluded that children's difficulty is likely to be due to the ill-structured nature of tool innovation problems, in which components of a solution must be retrieved and coordinated.

TL;DR: This work investigated infants' false-belief reasoning using a different paradigm, and found that 18-month-olds based their choice of whether to give a child a spoon or a block on her true or false belief about which object the block box contained.

TL;DR: The results underline the fact that the structure of the language of instruction is an important factor in children's mathematical education and needs to be taken into account even for seemingly nonverbal symbolic Arabic tasks.

TL;DR: These findings are suggested to be compatible with the notion that the process of learning orthographic representations during reading acquisition sharpens pre-existing lexical representations, which in turn supports anticipation of upcoming spoken words.

TL;DR: Individual differences in how set size affected enumeration of grouped arrays showed unique patterns of association with performance on standardized symbolic arithmetic fluency tests, suggesting a unique role for the construct of groupitizing in the development of enumeration fluency and symbolic math skills.

TL;DR: This study is the first to empirically test tool innovation in children from non-Western backgrounds, with the data being consistent with the view that despite its key role in human evolution, a capacity for innovation in tool making remains remarkably undeveloped during early childhood.

TL;DR: The authors compared oral and silent reading fluency by examining whether these reading modes relate to the same underlying reading-related cognitive skills, including phonological awareness, rapid naming, and visual attention span.