Initial acquisition of the first symbolic numbers is measured with the Give a Number (GaN) task. According to the classic method, it is assumed that children who know only 1, 2, 3, or 4 in the GaN task, (termed separately one-, two-, three-, and four-knowers, or collectively subset-knowers) have only a limited conceptual understanding of numbers.…

Children with dyslexia frequently also struggle with math. However, studies of reading disability (RD) rarely assess math skill, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying co-occurring reading and math disability (RD+MD) are not clear. The current study aimed to identify behavioral and neurocognitive factors associated with co-occurring MD among…

Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within-event integration and between-event differentiation processes that organize events according to their…

As adults, we represent and think about number, space, and time in at least two ways: our intuitive--but imprecise--perceptual representations, and the slowly learned--but precise--number words. With development, these representational formats interface, allowing us to use precise number words to estimate imprecise perceptual experiences. We test…

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects…

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) is a well-established predictor of children's neurocognitive development. Several theories propose that specific cognitive skills are particularly vulnerable. However, this can be challenging to test, because cognitive assessments are not pure measures of distinct neurocognitive processes, and scores across…

The prevalent "core phonological deficit" model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for example, perceiving and identifying syllable stress patterns, syllables, rhymes and phonemes. Yet spoken word…

Conversational turn-taking is a complex communicative skill that requires both linguistic and executive functioning (EF) skills, including processing input while simultaneously forming and inhibiting responses until one's turn. Adult-child turn-taking predicts children's linguistic, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, little is…

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech…

As reading is inherently a multisensory, audiovisual (AV) process where visual symbols (i.e., letters) are connected to speech sounds, the question has been raised whether individuals with reading difficulties, like children with developmental dyslexia (DD), have broader impairments in multisensory processing. This question has been posed before,…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic syndrome. As with all rare syndromes, obtaining adequately powered sample sizes is a challenge. Here we present legacy data from seven UK labs, enabling the characterisation of cross-sectional and longitudinal developmental trajectories of verbal and non-verbal development in the largest sample of…

To examine the effects of childhood parent-child separation with varying duration and form on later cognitive performance and psychopathological problems over a 6-year period, we use data from the China Family Panel Study (CFPS), which is an ongoing, prospective nationally representative study across 25 provinces in China. Of the 4033 children…

Children who like to read and write tend to be better at it. This association is typically interpreted as enjoyment impacting engagement in literacy activities, which boosts literacy skills. We fitted direction-of-causation models to partial data of 3690 Finnish twins aged 12. Literacy skills were rated by the twins' teachers and literacy…

Previous findings on the association between theory of mind (ToM) and aggression in children are mixed. The "social skills deficit view" regarded ToM as a "single-edged sword" and proposed that a lack of ToM can lead to aggression, while the "double-edged sword view" proposed that children with advanced ToM can still…

Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a spontaneous preference for numerical, compared to non-numerical (e.g., cumulative surface area), information. However, given a paucity of research on the perception of non-numerical magnitudes, it is unclear whether this preference reflects a specific bias towards number, or a general bias towards the…