Using a network analytic framework, this study introduces a new method to measure peer influence based on adolescents’ affiliations or 2-mode social network data. Exposure based on affiliations is referred to as the “affiliation exposure model.” This study demonstrates the methodology using data on young adolescent smoking being influenced by joint participation in school-based organized sports activities with smokers. The analytic sample consisted of 1,260 American adolescents from ages 10 to 13 in middle schools, and the results of the longitudinal regression analyses showed that adolescents were more likely to smoke as they were increasingly exposed to teammates who smoke. This study illustrates the importance of peer influence via affiliation through team sports.

Theory and policy highlight the role of child care in preparing children for the transition into school. Approaching this issue in a different way, this study investigated whether children’s care experiences before this transition promoted their mothers’ school involvement after it, with the hypothesized mechanism for this link being the cultivation of children’s social and academic skills. Analyses of 1,352 children (1 month–6 years) and parents in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development revealed that mothers were more involved at their children’s schools when children had prior histories of high-quality nonparental care. This pattern, which was fairly stable across levels of maternal education and employment, was mediated by children’s academic skills and home environments.

A longitudinal investigation was conducted to explicate the network of associations between depressive symptoms and peer difficulties among 486 fourth through sixth graders (M = 9.93 years). Parent and teacher reports of depressive symptoms; peer, self, and teacher reports of victimization; and peer reports of peer acceptance were obtained. A systematic examination of nested structural equation models provided support for a symptoms-driven model whereby depressive symptoms contributed to peer difficulties; no evidence was found for interpersonal risk or transactional models. Analyses further revealed that victimization mediated the association between prior depressive symptoms and subsequent peer acceptance. Results extend knowledge about the temporal ordering of depressive symptoms and peer difficulties and elucidate one process through which depressive symptoms disrupt peer relationships.

Understanding the impact of political violence on child maladjustment is a matter of international concern. Recent research has advanced a social ecological explanation for relations between political violence and child adjustment. However, conclusions are qualified by the lack of longitudinal tests. Toward examining pathways longitudinally, mothers and their adolescents (M = 12.33, SD = 1.78, at Time 1) from 2-parent families in Catholic and Protestant working class neighborhoods in Belfast, Northern Ireland, completed measures assessing multiple levels of a social ecological model. Utilizing autoregressive controls, a 3-wave longitudinal model test (T1, n = 299; T2, n = 248; T3, n = 197) supported a specific pathway linking sectarian community violence, family conflict, children’s insecurity about family relationships, and adjustment problems.

A total of 104 six-year-old children belonging to 4 groups (English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals) were compared on 3 verbal tasks and 1 nonverbal executive control task to examine the generality of the bilingual effects on development. Bilingual groups differed in degree of similarity between languages, cultural background, and language of schooling. On the executive control task, all bilingual groups performed similarly and exceeded monolinguals; on the language tasks the best performance was achieved by bilingual children whose language of instruction was the same as the language of testing and whose languages had more overlap. Thus, executive control outcomes for bilingual children are general but performance on verbal tasks is specific to factors in the bilingual experience.

This study examined whether the longitudinal links between mothers’ use of spanking and children’s externalizing behaviors are moderated by family race/ethnicity, as would be predicted by cultural normativeness theory, once mean differences in frequency of use are controlled. A nationally representative sample of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American families (n = 11,044) was used to test a cross-lagged path model from 5 to 8 years old. While race/ethnic differences were observed in the frequency of spanking, no differences were found in the associations of spanking and externalizing over time: Early spanking predicted increases in children’s externalizing while early child externalizing elicited more spanking over time across all race/ethnic groups.

Children aged 3–12 years (n = 184) with typical development, deafness, autism, or Asperger syndrome took a series of theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks to confirm and extend previous developmental scaling evidence. A new sarcasm task, in the format of H. M. Wellman and D. Liu’s (2004) 5-step ToM Scale, added a statistically reliable 6th step to the scale for all diagnostic groups. A key previous finding, divergence in task sequencing for children with autism, was confirmed. Comparisons among diagnostic groups, controlling age, and language ability, showed that typical developers mastered the 6 ToM steps ahead of each of the 3 disabled groups, with implications for ToM theories. The final (sarcasm) task challenged even nondisabled 9-year-olds, demonstrating the new scale’s sensitivity to post-preschool ToM growth.

Data from 492 Italian infants (8–18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) “vocabulary” and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension than word production. A clear developmental pattern for the different types of A-G was found. These findings are similar to those of different Western languages, indicating a common biological and cultural basis. The analysis of individual A-G and their relations with early words with a related meaning showed interesting similarities between the production of A-G with and without object manipulation and the comprehension and production of corresponding words. Results indicate that the transition from A-G to spoken language is mediated by word comprehension.

Children ask questions and learn from the responses they receive; however, little is known about how children learn from listening to others ask questions. Five experiments examined preschoolers’ (N = 179) ability to solve simple problems using information gathered from listening to question-and-answer exchanges between 2 parties present in the same room. Overall, the ability to efficiently use information gathered from overheard exchanges improved between ages 3 and 5. Critically, however, across ages children solved the majority of problems correctly, suggesting preschoolers are capable of learning from others’ questions. Moreover, children learned from others’ questions without explicit instruction and when engaged in another activity. Implications for the development of problem-solving skills are discussed.

Recent studies have demonstrated that genetic influences on cognitive ability and academic achievement are larger for children raised in higher socioeconomic status (SES) homes. However, little work has been done to document the psychosocial processes that underlie this Gene × Environment interaction. One process may involve the conversion of intellectual interest into academic achievement. Analyses of data from 777 pairs of 17-year-old twins indicated that Gene × SES effects on achievement scores can be accounted for by stronger influences of genes for intellectual interest on achievement at higher levels of SES. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that higher SES affords greater opportunity for children to seek out and benefit from learning experiences that are congruent with their genetically influenced intellectual interests.

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with age. This was particularly true immediately following a cut to a new scene, partly because older viewers (but not infants) tended to fixate the center of the screen following a cut. Conversely, infants appear to require several seconds to orient to a new scene. Results are interpreted in the context of developing attention skills. Findings have implications for the extent to which infants comprehend and learn from commercial video.

The present study examined whether repeated exposure to daily surveys about negative social experiences predicts changes in adolescents’ daily and general maladjustment, and whether question content moderates these changes. Across a 2-week period, 6th-grade students (N = 215; mode age = 11) completed 5 daily reports tapping experienced or experienced and witnessed negative events, or they completed no daily reports. General maladjustment was measured in 2-week intervals before, at the end of, and 2 weeks after the daily report study. Daily maladjustment either decreased or did not change across the 5 daily report exposures. General maladjustment decreased across the three 2-week intervals. Combined, results indicate that short-term daily report studies do not place youth at risk for increased maladjustment.

Several theoretical approaches have discussed the role of children’s expectations of their parent’s responsiveness in explaining motivation to collaborate in acquiring skills. This study attempted to measure these expectations in 102 toddlers (M age = 26.4 months) through observations of attention-seeking (A-S) behaviors during caregiver’s restricted availability. Child collaboration was coded during skill-learning tasks (imitation and block building), and parent responsiveness was observed during dyadic activities. Different A-S styles emerged, supporting the existence of both positive and negative expectations of responsiveness. A-S quality statistically mediated the link between parent responsiveness and child collaborative outcomes, even after controlling for temperament and mood. This is the first study to show that toddlers’ expectations are a plausible mechanism linking parent responsiveness to child collaboration.

Infants imitate others’ individual actions, but do they also replicate others’ joint activities? To examine whether observing joint action influences infants’ initiation of joint action, forty-eight 18-month-old infants observed object demonstrations by 2 models acting together (joint action), 2 models acting individually (individual action), or 1 model acting alone (solitary action). Infants’ behavior was examined after they were given each object. Infants in the joint action condition attempted to initiate joint action more often than infants in the other conditions, yet they were equally likely to communicate for other reasons and to imitate the demonstrated object-directed actions. The findings suggest that infants learn to replicate others’ joint activity through observation, an important skill for cultural transmission of shared practices.

Over their 1st year of life, infants’“universal” perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language—American Sign Language (ASL). Four-month-old, English-only, hearing infants discriminated an ASL handshape distinction, while 14-month-old hearing infants did not. Fourteen-month-old ASL-learning infants, however, did discriminate the handshape distinction, suggesting that, as in heard language, exposure to seen language is required for maintenance of visual language discrimination. Perceptual narrowing appears to be a ubiquitous learning mechanism that contributes to language acquisition.

Children’s confidence in their own knowledge may influence their willingness to learn novel information from others. Twenty-four-month-old children’s (N = 160) willingness to learn novel labels for either familiar or novel objects from an adult speaker was tested in 1 of 5 conditions: accurate, inaccurate, knowledgeable, ignorant, or uninformative. Children were willing to learn a second label for an object from a reliable informant in the accurate, knowledgeable, and uninformative conditions; children were less willing to apply a novel label to a familiar object if the speaker previously was inaccurate or had expressed ignorance. However, when the objects were novel, children were willing to learn the label regardless of the speaker’s knowledge level.

Young children who have experienced early adversity are at risk for developing disorganized attachments. The efficacy of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), an intervention targeting nurturing care among parents identified as being at risk for neglecting their young children, was evaluated through a randomized clinical trial. Attachment quality was assessed in the Strange Situation for 120 children between 11.7 and 31.9 months of age (M = 19.1, SD = 5.5). Children in the ABC intervention showed significantly lower rates of disorganized attachment (32%) and higher rates of secure attachment (52%) relative to the control intervention (57% and 33%, respectively). These results support the efficacy of the ABC intervention in enhancing attachment quality among parents at high risk for maltreatment.

A critique of research examining whether early experiences with primary caregivers are reflected in adaptation is that relevant longitudinal studies have generally not employed genetically informed research designs capable of unconfounding shared genes and environments. Using the twin subsample (N = 485 pairs) of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, the current study provides evidence that early parental support (derived from observations at 24 months and around age 4, in prekindergarten) is associated with academic skills (r = .32), social competence (r = .15), and externalizing behavior (r = −.11) in kindergarten. Crucially, the shared environment accounted for virtually all of the correlation between parenting and academic skills, roughly half of the association between parenting and social competence, and approximately one fourth of the correlation between parenting and externalizing behavior.

Developmental trajectories and individual differences in 70 American middle-income 2½- to 4-year olds’ moral judgments were examined 3 times across 1 year using latent growth modeling. At Wave 1, children distinguished hypothetical moral from conventional transgressions on all criteria, but only older preschoolers did so when rating deserved punishment. Children’s understanding of moral transgressions as wrong independent of authority grew over time. Greater surgency and effortful control were both associated with a better understanding of moral generalizability. Children higher in effortful control also grew more slowly in understanding that moral rules are not alterable and that moral transgressions are wrong independent of rules. Girls demonstrated sharper increases across time than boys in understanding the nonalterability of moral rules.

This meta-analytic review examines the association between attachment and internalizing symptomatology during childhood, and compares the strength of this association with that for externalizing symptomatology. Based on 42 independent samples (N = 4,614), the association between insecurity and internalizing symptoms was small, yet significant (d = 0.15, CI 0.06∼0.25) and not moderated by assessment age of internalizing problems. Avoidance, but not resistance (d = 0.03, CI −0.11∼0.17) or disorganization (d = 0.08, CI −0.06∼0.22), was significantly associated with internalizing symptoms (d = 0.17, CI 0.03∼0.31). Insecurity and disorganization were more strongly associated with externalizing than internalizing symptoms. Discussion focuses on the significance of attachment for the development of internalizing versus externalizing symptomatology.

Children vary widely in the rate at which they acquire words—some start slow and speed up, others start fast and continue at a steady pace. Do early developmental variations of this sort help predict vocabulary skill just prior to kindergarten entry? This longitudinal study starts by examining important predictors (socioeconomic status [SES], parent input, child gesture) of vocabulary growth between 14 and 46 months (n = 62) and then uses growth estimates to predict children’s vocabulary at 54 months. Velocity and acceleration in vocabulary development at 30 months predicted later vocabulary, particularly for children from low-SES backgrounds. Understanding the pace of early vocabulary growth thus improves our ability to predict school readiness and may help identify children at risk for starting behind.

Generic statements (e.g., “Lions have manes”) make claims about kinds (e.g., lions as a category) and, for adults, are distinct from quantificational statements (e.g., “Most lions have manes”), which make claims about how many individuals have a given property. This article examined whether young children also understand that generics do not depend purely on quantitative information. Five-year-olds (n = 36) evaluated pairs of questions expressing properties that were matched in prevalence but varied in whether adults accept them as generically true (e.g., “Do lions have manes?” [true] vs. “Are lions boys?” [false]). Results demonstrated that children evaluate generics based on more than just quantitative information. Data suggest that even young children recognize that generics make claims about kinds.

Young infants are sensitive to self-directed social actions, but do they appreciate the intentional, target-directed nature of such behaviors? The authors addressed this question by investigating infants’ understanding of social gaze in third-party interactions (N = 104). Ten-month-old infants discriminated between 2 people in mutual versus averted gaze, and expected a person to look at her social partner during conversation. In contrast, 9-month-old infants showed neither ability, even when provided with information that highlighted the gazer’s social goals. These results indicate considerable improvement in infants’ abilities to analyze the social gaze of others toward the end of their 1st year, which may relate to their appreciation of gaze as both a social and goal-directed action.

Five- to 10-year-olds (N = 90) listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event (and feel good), negative event (and feel bad), or ambiguous event (and feel okay). Afterward, one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought. Children predicted and explained each character’s emotions. Results showed significant development between 5 and 10 years in children’s understanding that thinking positively improves emotions and thinking negatively makes one feel worse, with earliest knowledge demonstrated when reasoning about ambiguous and positive events. Individual differences in child and parental optimism and hope predicted children’s knowledge about thought–emotion connections on some measures, including their beliefs about the emotional benefits of thinking positively in negative situations.

Adolescents’ social judgments and emotion attributions about exclusion in three contexts, nationality, gender, and personality, were measured in a sample of 12- and 15-year-old Swiss and non-Swiss adolescents (N = 247). Overall, adolescents judged exclusion based on nationality as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender or personality. Non-Swiss participants, however, who reflected newly immigrated children to Switzerland, viewed exclusion based on nationality as more wrong than did Swiss participants and attributed more positive emotions to the excluder than did Swiss participants. Girls viewed exclusion in nationality and personality contexts as less legitimate than did boys, and they attributed less positive emotions to excluder target in the nationality context than did boys. The findings extend existing research on exclusion by focusing on both emotion attributions as well as judgments and by investigating exclusion in a sample that included a recent immigrant group.

This study examined age differences in 299 preschoolers’ responses to investigative interviewers’ questions exploring the suspected occurrence of child abuse. Analyses focused on the children’s tendencies to respond (a) at all, (b) appropriately to the issue raised by the investigator, and (c) informatively, providing previously undisclosed information. Linear developmental trends characterized all types of responding. When the types of prompts were considered, 3- to 4-year-olds responded slightly more informatively to specific (directive) recall prompts than to open-ended prompts whereas children aged 5 and older were more responsive to open-ended recall prompts. The findings suggest that even 3-year-olds can provide information about experienced events when recall processes are activated, although the ability to provide narrative responses to open-ended recall prompts only becomes reliable later in development.

Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 (N = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in the size of piles of sand that they see poured from a container when there is a 1-to-4 ratio. Experiment 2 (N = 82) tested whether infants could discriminate a 1-to-2 ratio. The results demonstrate that females could discriminate the difference but males could not. These findings constitute the youngest evidence of successful quantity discriminations for a noncohesive substance and begin to characterize the nature of the representation for noncohesive entities.

Spending leisure time with deviant peers may have strong influences on adolescents’ delinquency. The current 3-wave multi-informant study examined how parental control and parental prohibition of friendships relate to these undesirable peer influences. To this end, annual questionnaires were administered to 497 Dutch youths (283 boys, mean age = 13 years at baseline), their best friends, and both parents. Cross-lagged panel analyses revealed strong longitudinal links from contacts with deviant peers to adolescent delinquency, but not vice versa. Parent-reported prohibition of friendships positively predicted contacts with deviant peers and indirectly predicted higher adolescent delinquency. Similar indirect effects were not found for parental control. The results suggest that forbidden friends may become “forbidden fruit,” leading to unintended increases in adolescents’ own delinquency.

Fifteen-year-old adolescents (N = 109) in a longitudinal study of child development were recruited to examine differences in DNA methylation in relation to parent reports of adversity during the adolescents’ infancy and preschool periods. Microarray technology applied to 28,000 cytosine–guanine dinucleotide sites within DNA derived from buccal epithelial cells showed differential methylation among adolescents whose parents reported high levels of stress during their children’s early lives. Maternal stressors in infancy and paternal stressors in the preschool years were most strongly predictive of differential methylation, and the patterning of such epigenetic marks varied by children’s gender. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report of prospective associations between adversities in early childhood and the epigenetic conformation of adolescents’ genomic DNA.

As with any discipline, the field of child development progresses by both deepening and broadening its conceptual and empirical perspective. The rewards to refinement are impressive, but there is little need for encouragement in this area, since existing disciplines, universities, and funding agencies reward depth. The current study makes the case for breadth: for combining insights from different disciplines and methods in synergistic ways. Examples include influences of family poverty on children, inequality and child development, and methods for assessing impacts of policies. Drawing together disparate ideas from different research traditions can be not only time consuming and frustrating but also deeply rewarding, both scientifically and personally. The study closes with thoughts about how departments, universities, funding agencies, and Society for Research in Child Development itself might promote interdisciplinary inquiry.

The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) is a nationally representative, internationally comparable household survey implemented to examine protective and risk factors of child development in developing countries around the world. This introduction describes the conceptual framework, nature of the MICS3, and general analytic plan of articles in this Special Section. The articles that follow describe the situations of children with successive foci on nutrition, parenting, discipline and violence, and the home environment. They address 2 common questions: How do developing and underresearched countries in the world vary with respect to these central indicators of children’s development? How do key indicators of national development relate to child development in each of these substantive areas? The Special Section concludes with policy implications from the international findings.

Feeding practices are important determinants of growth and development of children. Using infant and young child feeding indicators and complementary feeding guidelines, 7 practices in 28 countries are described, showing substantial variation across countries. Only 25% of 0- to 5-month-olds were exclusively breastfed, and only half of 6- to 8-month-olds received complementary foods the previous day. Median duration of breastfeeding and increase of fluid intake during diarrhea were low among countries with a high Human Development Index (HDI). Living in high-HDI countries may not translate to positive feeding practices. Across countries, there is a need for promotion, protection, and support of optimal breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices as well as better adherence to recommendations for feeding during illness.

Enriching caregiving practices foster the course and outcome of child development. This study examined 2 developmentally significant domains of positive caregiving—cognitive and socioemotional—in more than 127,000 families with under-5 year children from 28 developing countries. Mothers varied widely in cognitive and socioemotional caregiving and engaged in more socioemotional than cognitive activities. More than half of mothers played with their children and took them outside, but only a third or fewer read books and told stories to their children. The GDP of countries related to caregiving after controlling for life expectancy and education. The majority of mothers report that they do not leave their under-5s alone. Policy and intervention recommendations are elaborated.

The present study examined the prevalence and country-level correlates of 11 responses to children’s behavior, including nonviolent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical violence, as well as endorsement of the use of physical punishment, in 24 countries using data from 30,470 families with 2- to 4-year-old children that participated in UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. The prevalence of each response varied widely across countries, as did the amount of variance accounted for by country in relation to each response. Country-level indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment, and economic well-being were related to several responses to children’s behavior. Country-level factors are widely related to parents’ methods of teaching children good behavior and responding to misbehavior.

This study examined home environment conditions (housing quality, material resources, formal and informal learning materials) and their relations with the Human Development Index (HDI) in 28 developing countries. Home environment conditions in these countries varied widely. The quality of housing and availability of material resources at home were consistently tied to HDI; the availability of formal and informal learning materials a little less so. Gross domestic product (GDP) tended to show a stronger independent relation with housing quality and material resources than life expectancy and education. Formal learning resources were independently related to the GDP and education indices, and informal learning resources were not independently related to any constituent indices of the overall HDI.

The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey was used to provide information on feeding practices, caregiving, discipline and violence, and the home environment for young children across 28 countries. The findings from the series of studies in this Special Section are the first of their kind because they provide information on the most proximal context for development of the youngest children in the majority world using one of the only data sets to study these contexts across countries. Using the framework of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular the Rights to Survival, Development and Protection, findings are explained with implications for international and national-level social policies. Implications are also discussed, with respect to policy makers and the larger international community, who have the obligation to uphold these rights.

In this study, the prevailing view that girls are pervasively more skilled in their friendships than boys was challenged by examining whether girls respond more negatively than boys when a friend violates core friendship expectations. Fourth- and fifth-grade children (n = 267) responded to vignettes depicting transgressions involving a friend’s betrayal, unreliability, or failure to provide support or help. Results indicated that girls were more troubled by the transgressions, more strongly endorsed various types of negative relationship interpretations of the friend’s actions, and reported more anger and sadness than did boys. Girls also endorsed revenge goals and aggressive strategies just as much as boys. These findings lead to a more complex view of boys’ and girls’ friendship competencies.

Using recent cross-sectional data of rural children aged from 8 to 18 in Hunan Province of China, this article examines psychological, behavioral, and educational outcomes and the psychosocial contexts of these outcomes among children left behind by one or both of their rural-to-urban migrant parents compared to those living in nonmigrant families. The results showed that left-behind children were disadvantaged in health behavior and school engagement but not in perceived satisfaction. The child’s psychosocial environment, captured by family socioeconomic status, socializing processes, peer and school support, and psychological traits, were associated with, to varying extent, child developmental outcomes in rural China. These influences largely remain constant for the sampled children regardless of their parents’ migrant status.

This study investigated young children’s commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child had to continue to collaborate even though there was no further reward available to her. The study found that 3.5-year-olds, but not 2.5-year-olds, eagerly assisted their unlucky partner. They did this less readily in a noncollaborative control condition. A second study confirmed that 2.5-year-old children understood the task structure. These results suggest that children begin to appreciate the normative dimensions of collaborative activities during the 3rd year of life.

To assess the flexibility of reasoning about gender, children ages 4, 6, and 8 years (N = 72) were interviewed about gender norms when different domains were highlighted. The majority of participants at all ages judged a reversal of gender norms in a different cultural context to be acceptable. They also judged gender norms as a matter of personal choice and they negatively evaluated a rule enforcing gender norms in schools. Older children were more likely to show flexibility than younger children. Justifications obtained from 6- and 8-year-olds showed that they considered adherence to gender norms a matter of personal choice and they viewed the rule enforcing gender norms as unfair.

This report describes the first prospective study specifically designed to assess children’s verbal memory for a unique event 6 years after it occurred. Forty-six 27- to 51-month-old children took part in a unique event and were interviewed about it twice, after 24-hr and 6-year delays. During the 6-year interview, 9 children verbally recalled the event, including 2 who were under 3 years old when the event occurred. This may be the most convincing evidence to date that such early experiences can be verbally recalled after long delays. These data have important implications for current theories of memory development and childhood amnesia and underscore some of the problems associated with evaluating the veracity of early memories under less controlled conditions.

Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years (N = 80) examined the relation between explanation and exploratory behavior following consistent versus inconsistent outcomes. Results indicated that for inconsistent outcomes only, the kind of explanation children provided informed the kind of exploratory behavior they engaged in and the extent to which children modified and generated new hypotheses. In sum, the data provide insight into a mechanism by which explaining inconsistent evidence guides causal cognition.

Children gradually develop interpretive theory of mind (iToM)—the understanding that different people may interpret identical events or stimuli differently. The present study tested whether more advanced iToM underlies children’s recognition that map symbols’ meanings must be communicated to others when symbols are iconic (resemble their referents). Children (6–9 years; N = 80) made maps using either iconic or abstract symbols. After accounting for age, intelligence, vocabulary, and memory, iToM predicted children’s success in communicating symbols’ meaning to a naïve map-user when mapping tasks involved iconic (but not abstract) symbols. Findings suggest children’s growing appreciation of alternative representations and of the intentional assignment of meaning, and support the contention that ToM progresses beyond mastery of false belief.

Using online measures of familiar word recognition in the looking-while-listening procedure, this prospective longitudinal study revealed robust links between processing efficiency and vocabulary growth from 18 to 30 months in children classified as typically developing (n = 46) and as “late talkers” (n = 36) at 18 months. Those late talkers who were more efficient in word recognition at 18 months were also more likely to “bloom,” showing more accelerated vocabulary growth over the following year, compared with late talkers less efficient in early speech processing. Such findings support the emerging view that early differences in processing efficiency evident in infancy have cascading consequences for later learning and may be continuous with individual differences in language proficiency observed in older children and adults.

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of explicit false belief understanding in 91 English-speaking typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months) and 30 children with specific language impairment (M age = 63.0 months). Concurrent and longitudinal findings converge in supporting a model in which maternal language input predicts the child’s memory for false complements, which predicts cognitive flexibility, which in turn predicts explicit false belief understanding.

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds’ use of isolated pitch cues to emotions in interactive tasks. Only 4- to 5-year-olds consistently interpreted exaggerated, stereotypically happy or sad pitch contours as evidence that a puppet had succeeded or failed to find his toy (Experiment 1) or was happy or sad (Experiments 2, 3). Two- and 3-year-olds exploited facial and body-language cues in the same task. The authors discuss the implications of this late-developing use of pitch cues to emotions, relating them to other functions of pitch.

Fifty 8-month-old infants participated in a study of the interrelations among cognition, temperament, and electrophysiology. Better performance on a working memory task (assessed using a looking version of the A-not-B task) was associated with increases in frontal–parietal EEG coherence from baseline to task, as well as elevated levels of frontal–occipital coherence during both baseline and task. Enhanced performance was also associated with decreased heart period (increased heart rate) from baseline to task. Infants with better working memory performance had parents who rated them high on activity level and distress to limitations. When considered collectively, EEG coherence and heart period contributed unique variance in the prediction of high and low performance groups. Implications for the study of infant cognition are discussed.

Actigraphs and parent and observer ratings were used to explore genetic influences on continuity and change in activity level (AL) in early childhood. Over 300 pairs of twins wore actigraphs for a 48-hr period in the home and laboratory at ages 2 and 3. AL was genetically influenced at both ages with little evidence of differential heritability across age. For all measures, genetic influences contributed to phenotypic continuity. With the exception of the actigraph measure of AL in the home, new genetic effects emerged at age 3 indicating that genetic factors influence both continuity and change in AL in early childhood. Nonshared environmental influences were also a source of change in AL across the transition from infancy to early childhood.

A person-oriented approach examined patterns of functioning in social and executive function domains at 54 months and in turn forecasted 5th-grade socioemotional and achievement outcomes for 944 children. Six distinct profiles of 54-month school readiness patterns predicted outcomes in 5th grade with indications of cross-domain association between 54-month performance and later functioning. A group of children at 54 months characterized by low working memory exhibited elevated levels of socioemotional problems and low achievement in 5th grade. Patterns in which high social competence or high working memory were prominent predicted high 5th-grade achievement. Unexpectedly, a group distinguished by attention problems performed well on later achievement outcomes. After controlling for children’s early demographics, readiness profiles accounted for math achievement in 5th grade.

Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort, this study examines the role that bilingualism plays in children’s academic developmental trajectories during their early school years, with particular attention on the school environment (N = 16,380). Growth-curve results showed that despite starting with lower math scores in kindergarten, Mixed Bilingual children fully closed the math gap with their White English Monolingual peers by fifth grade. However, because non-English-Dominant Bilinguals and non-English Monolinguals started kindergarten with significantly lower reading and math scores compared to their English Monolingual peers, by fifth grade the former groups still had significantly lower scores. School-level factors explained about one third of the reductions in the differences in children’s academic performance.

Living in complex social worlds, individuals encounter discordant values across life contexts, potentially resulting in different importance of values across contexts. Value differentiation is defined here as the degree to which values receive different importance depending on the context in which they are considered. Early and mid-adolescents (N = 3,497; M = 11.45 years, SD = 0.87 and M = 16.10 years, SD = 0.84, respectively) from 4 cultural groups (majority and former Soviet Union immigrants in Israel and Germany) rated their values in 3 contexts (family, school, and country). Value differentiation varied across individuals. Early adolescents showed lower value differentiation than mid-adolescents. Immigrant (especially first generation) adolescents, showed higher value differentiation than majority adolescents, reflecting the complex social reality they face while negotiating cultures.

The extent to which peer influences on substance use in adolescence systematically vary in strength based on qualities of the adolescent and his or her close friend was assessed in a study of 157 adolescents (age: M = 13.35, SD = 0.64), their close friends, and their parents assessed longitudinally with a combination of observational, analogue, sociometric, and self-report measures from early to mid adolescence. The degree to which adolescents changed their levels of substance use in accord with their peers’ baseline levels of use was predicted by a range of theoretically salient factors including: observed teen lack of autonomy and social support in prior interactions with mothers, low teen refusal skills, and the level of social acceptance of their close friend. Findings suggest the importance of both internal factors (e.g., autonomy and relatedness struggles) and external factors (e.g., social status of friends) in explaining why vulnerability to peer influence processes may be much greater for some adolescents than others.

This study tests a model of reciprocal influences between absenteeism and youth psychopathology using 3 longitudinal datasets (Ns = 20,745, 2,311, and 671). Participants in 1st through 12th grades were interviewed annually or biannually. Measures of psychopathology include self-, parent-, and teacher-report questionnaires. Structural cross-lagged regression models were tested. In a nationally representative data set (Add Health), middle school students with relatively greater absenteeism at Study Year 1 tended toward increased depression and conduct problems in Study Year 2, over and above the effects of autoregressive associations and demographic covariates. The opposite direction of effects was found for both middle and high school students. Analyses with 2 regionally representative data sets were also partially supportive. Longitudinal links were more evident in adolescence than in childhood.

Children (n = 130; M_age = 8.51–15.68 years) and college-aged adults (n = 72; M_age = 20.50 years) completed numerosity discrimination and lexical decision tasks. Children produced longer response times (RTs) than adults. R. Ratcliff’s (1978) diffusion model, which divides processing into components (e.g., quality of evidence, decision criteria settings, nondecision time), was fit to the accuracy and RT distribution data. Differences in all components were responsible for slowing in children in these tasks. Children extract lower quality evidence than college-aged adults, unlike older adults who extract a similar quality of evidence as college-aged adults. Thus, processing components responsible for changes in RTs at the beginning of the life span are somewhat different from those responsible for changes occurring with healthy aging.

Drawing on developmental and policy research, this study examined whether 3 dimensions of caseworker–recipient interaction in welfare offices functioned as critical ecological contexts for recipient families. The sample consisted of 1,098 families from 10 welfare offices in National Evaluation of Welfare to Work Strategies (NEWWS). In multilevel analyses, caseworker support, caseload size, and emphasis on employment predicted 5-year quarterly trajectories of earnings, income, and welfare receipt. Recipients in offices characterized by high support had steeper increases in earnings and income; those in offices with high caseload size had steeper decreases in income and welfare receipt; and those in offices with high emphasis on employment had steeper decreases in welfare receipt. These economic trajectories were associated with children’s reading and math achievement and internalizing behavior at ages 8–10.