The primary focus of the study was to determine the relations among vocabulary and phonological awareness skills in two groups of preschool-aged children (n=118): those with typical vocabulary skills and those with deficits in expressive and receptive vocabulary. Additionally, we sought to determine if the patterns of relations among the variables differed by vocabulary status. Finally, given t...

The present study reports on the development and evaluation of an intervention program to prevent sexual abuse in the preschool age. The main aim of the program is to increase the social competencies of preschool children. Starting from critiques at existing prevention programs an intervention adapted at the cognitive abilities of preschool children was developed. The central themes of the prog...

State and local governments that wish to establish or improve preschool programs need cost estimates to evaluate the magnitude of appropriations required. Yet even a casual scrutiny of available expenditure data reveals an enormous variance between the most expensive and least expensive preschool provisions. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the root causes of differences in per-student...

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are (1) joking and (2) pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to (1) joke and (2) pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as distinguishing these two forms of nonliteral acts could open ...

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are (1) joking and (2) pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to (1) joke and (2) pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as distinguishing these two forms of non-literal acts could open...

Using a new paradigm for measuring children’s saving behaviors involving two marble games differing in desirability, we assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds saved marbles for future use, saved increasingly on a second trial, saved increasingly with age, and were sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. We also assessed whether performance on the saving paradigm was related to theo...

This study explores the grammatical representations employed by preschoolers during online sentence processing. Tomasello and colleagues have argued that young children, unlike adults, are limited to structural representations organized around individual lexical items (Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000) 156). Evidence for broader syntactic representations in adults comes from, among other th...

PURPOSE To analyze the usefulness of the weight gain/height gain ratio from birth to two and three years of age as a predictive risk indicator of excess weight at preschool age. METHODS The weight and height/length of 409 preschool children at daycare centers were measured according to internationally recommended rules. The weight values and body mass indices of the children were transformed ...

OBJECTIVE In this prospective, longitudinal study of young children, we examined whether a history of preschool generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, and/or social phobia is associated with amygdala-prefrontal dysregulation at school-age. As an exploratory analysis, we investigated whether distinct anxiety disorders differ in the patterns of this amygdala-prefrontal dysregulation. METHODS ...