Communal Versus Individual Learning of a Math-Estimation Task: African American Children and the Culture of Learning Contexts

The authors compared the performance of 78 African American 5th-grade students who studied a math-estimation task in one of two learning contexts. Learning contexts differed in the degree to which they afforded the expression of communalism. ANCOVA confirmed that posttest performance was best for students who studied in the high communal-learning context. The findings support A. W. Boykin's (1994) contention that the cultural context of learning can be a critical mediator of children's performance.     

A tale of two countries: Singaporean and Chinese parents' emotion socialisation during childhood and the relation to adolescents' emotion regulation

This study examined the conceptualisation of Singaporean and Chinese parents' emotion socialisation in childhood and the relation to adolescents' emotion regulation with 601 adolescents aged 12–15. For both Singaporean and Chinese parents, we examined the factorial structure underlying six parental reactions to children's negative emotions, and the relations between the established factors with adolescents' cognitive reappraisal and response suppression. The findings revealed differences in the conceptualisation of parental reactions for Singaporean and Chinese parents, with the three- and four-factor models indicating good fit, respectively. For Singaporean parents, the factor comprising Expressive Encouragement, Emotion-Focused and Problem-Focused reactions was positively correlated with male adolescents' cognitive reappraisal, and the factor comprising Punitive and Distress Reactions was positively related to female adolescents' response suppression. For Chinese parents, the Expressive Encouragement factor was positively correlated with male adolescents' cognitive reappraisal. These findings on cultural differences in the factors underlying parental reactions and their relations with adolescents' emotion regulation support the emotion competency framework for understanding parents' emotion socialisation across cultures.     

Retrieval of Episodic Information From Memory: Comparisons Among 3- and 4-Year-Olds, 7- and 8-Year-Olds,and Adults

Young children's and adults' recall of episodic information was explored in 4 experiments. The task required participants to recall a target noun presented as the last item of a 4-noun string of related (either categorically or thematically) or unrelated words. Providing all 3 preceding nouns or a subset of them cued recall. Experiment 1 found that 7- and 8-year-old children's recall was better with pictures as opposed to text, and children showed performance equal to adults with thematically related pictorial stimuli. Using pictorial stimuli, Experiment 2 showed that the number of cues present at retrieval affected 7- and 8-year-olds' recall. Experiments 3 and 4 tested recall of episodic information in 3- and 4-year-olds using pictorial stimuli. The results suggested that young children also have access to episodic information in memory and the number of cues present at retrieval influenced recall. The findings are discussed in the context of children's memory for events.     

The influence of two years of school music training in secondary school on visual and auditory memory

The present study tested the effect of an extended music curriculum (EMC) for two years in secondary school, consisting of musical instrument, auditory perception, and music theory training, on children's visual and auditory memory. We tested 10-year-old children who had just started EMC and children without EMC (T0) in visual and auditory memory and retested the same children two years later (T1) to observe the effects of school music training. Confounding variables, like intelligence, socioeconomic status, extracurricular schooling, motivation to avoid work, and musical aptitude were controlled. Prior to the beginning of the music training no differences in the control variables and the memory variables between children with and without EMC were revealed. Children with EMC improved significantly from T0 to T1 in visual as well as in auditory memory. Such an improvement was not found for children without EMC. We conclude that extended school music training enhances children's visual and auditory memory.     

Culture and the Interaction of Student Ethnicity with Reward Structure in Group Learning

This study tests the hypothesis that cultural differences in group orientation predict an interaction between the student variable—ethnicity—and a learning context variable—reward structure—on math performance after group learning. One hundred and thirty-two African-American and European-American female and male fourth and fifth grade students studied math estimation in one of three group learning contexts. The learning contexts operationalized were: intergroup competitive, interpersonally competitive, and communal-no reward. ANCOVA confirmed a predicted interaction of ethnicity with learning context on post study session performance. Although there was no difference overall, African-American and European-American students performed best in the aggregate in different contexts. Independent ratings of students' group-positive behaviors mirrored the two-way interaction between learning context and ethnicity. The findings suggest that important student variables interact with the variable elements of group learning and should be studied in greater detail. They also support Boykin's (1994) contention that the cultural context of learning is a critical mediator of children's achievement.     

Art beyond Morality and Metaphysics: Late Joseon Korean Aesthetics

In the history of Chinese philosophy, Mozi calls music a “waste of resources,” considering it an aristocratic extravagance that does not benefit the everyday people. In its defense, Confucians highlight music's moral and metaphysical qualities, arguing that music aids in moral cultivation and that music's form mimics the structure of reality. The aim of this article is to show that Korean philosophers provide yet another reason to think music is important. Music, and art in general, was used to express a national identity at a time Korean philosophers were beginning to develop their own aesthetic consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A cultural movement called Joseonpoong (???), “Joseon wind,” marked a shift away from Sinocentrism and toward Korea's own unique values and practices. The new attempt to justify art's value apart from its relationship to morality or metaphysics set Joseon thinkers apart from their Chinese predecessors. Using art for identity expression allowed the Koreans to reconceive art's value while Sinocentric cosmological and cultural views were being challenged with the introduction of Western knowledge. Art also became a tool for reversing hermeneutic injustice as new artistic practices and standards allowed the Koreans to meaningfully engage with previously neglected aspects of their lived lives.     

Theory of mind and mental state discourse during book reading and story‐telling tasks

This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5–7‐year‐old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific to the mental states of the story characters and discourse after the book had ended were positively related to children's ToM, and this was due to parent elaborations. Studies 2 and 3 examined children's mental state discourse during story‐telling tasks, and in both, mental state discourse of children during narrative was concurrently related to ToM performance. While research has shown that mental state discourse of parents is related to children's ToM acquisition, the current research indicates that children's spontaneous use of mental state language examined outside of the interactional context is also a strong correlate.     

Rhythmic-movement facilitation of learning in working-class Afro-American children

In this study, we examined whether the cognitive performance of working-class Afro-American children could be enhanced based upon a presumed knowledge of the Black cultural experience. Children (6 and 9 years old) learned to match each of 12 pairs of pictures via a rhythmic movement-coordinated procedure accompanied by a musical beat or through a rote recitation procedure. It was expected and found that subsequent retention of the picture matches was superior in the rhythmic movement condition. Moreover, for the younger children, the effect was stronger for those who came from homes providing high stimulation and who had high levels of movement expressiveness.     

Cognitive Socialization Across Ethnocultural Contexts: Literacy and Cultural Differences in Intellectual Performance and Parent-Child Interaction

A comparative study of parent-child interaction and its relation to children's intellectual achievement is presented. The question of cultural continuities in cognitive development was examined. The cross-national design also illustrates some of the problems encountered when such relationships are studied across social contexts in general. The results suggest that although interaction characteristics are related to children's intellectual achievement, that relation is moderated by context factors that may operate differently in each culture. The findings are discussed in terms of how literacy mediates parents' teaching styles in ways that remain culturally ingrained. Research issues and recommendations for future research and policy are discussed.     

The role of situational goals and audience on self‐reported emotion experience and expression: Dutch and South Korean children compared

Previous research demonstrates that cultural concerns affect emotional lives. However, the question remains to what extent salient cultural concerns influence emotion experience and expression. In the present study, the role of (i) individualistic versus collectivistic goals and (ii) presence of an authority figure (father) versus an equal status figure (peer), were systematically investigated in 24 Dutch and 23 South Korean children's (a) negative emotion experience and (b) emotion expression and motives using hypothetical conflict situations. The results reveal that for children from both cultures emotion experience did not vary between situational goals and the audience present, however their emotion expression did. More specifically, cultural differences in how negative emotions would be expressed appeared in ‘father’ situations and not in ‘peer’ situations. Cultural differences in children's motives for emotion expression were revealed in situations with a collectivistic goal and not when an individualistic goal was presented. Moreover, within group analyses indicate that Dutch children's emotion expressions were more context‐sensitive than those of South Korean children. These results indicate that some situational features corresponding to cultural concerns partly explained cultural differences, whereas other features did not, helping to improve our understanding about variation in the emotional lives of different cultural groups. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sequential ordering in children's representations of rotation movements

This study compared Marmor's state-comparison mental rotation task and a movement recognition task with respect to the level of sequence knowledge required for correct performance. The movement recognition task assessed children's understanding that pivot position and the shape of a rotating object remain invariant throughout the movement. Based on an analysis of development in children's counting, we hypothesized that explicit knowledge of sequence relations is not needed on the state-comparison task but is needed on the pivot and shape recognition task. In Experiment 1, 5- and 7-year-old children performed on the state-comparison task and an ordering task involving a Mickey Mouse figure. In Experiment 2, children between the ages of 5 and 13 years performed on a pivot and shape recognition task and an ordering task involving rotating squares. As predicted, the results indicated that 5-year-olds can execute a mental rotation on the state-comparison task but cannot sequence states in the rotation movement, whereas sequencing was a prerequisite for identification of incorrect movement sequences on the recognition task. The implications of these findings for development in children's kinetic imagery were discussed.     

Increasing convergence between imagined and executed movement across development: evidence for the emergence of movement representations

Motor imagery (MI) has become a principal focus of interest in studies on brain and behavior. However, changes in MI across development have received virtually no attention so far. In the present study, children (N = 112, 6 to 16 years old) performed a new, computerized Virtual Radial Fitts Task (VRFT) to determine their MI ability as well as the age‐related confluence between performance in executed and imagined movement conditions. Participants aimed at five targets, which were positioned along radial axes from a central target circle. The targets differed in width (2.5, 5, 10, 20 or 40 mm), resulting in an index of difficulty (ID) that varied from 6.9 to 2.9 bits. Performance was indexed by the linear relationship between ID and Movement Time (MT). The findings showed that executed task performance was slower than imagined performance. Moreover, conformance to Fitts’ Law during executed movement performance was obtained from a very young age. Most importantly, correlations between imagined and executed movements were low in the young participants but gradually increased across age. These age‐related changes in MI are hypothesized to reflect the children's emerging ability to represent internal models for prospective actions, consistent with the gradual unfolding of feedforward control processes.     

The wildcard: A simple technique for improving children's target‐absent lineup performance

We attempted to increase children's willingness to reject target‐absent lineups by making identification and rejection response procedures highly comparable. Eight‐ to eleven‐year‐old children (N = 159) were briefly exposed to a confederate in the context of a staged event, and 24–48 hours later completed either a target‐present or target‐absent photographic lineup task. Within each lineup condition, children were either told to tell the experimenter if the target was not present (control condition), or provided with an additional photograph of a silhouetted figure with a large question mark superimposed (wildcard condition), and asked to point to this photograph if the target was not present. The wildcard increased children's accuracy on the target‐absent lineup without affecting their target‐present performance. In fact, performance was increased to a point at which target‐absent and target‐present accuracy did not differ significantly. These findings offer a promising, easily‐implemented intervention for reducing children's eyewitness identification errors. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Literacy acquisition influences children's rapid automatized naming

Previous research has established that learning to read improves children's performance on reading‐related phonological tasks, including phoneme awareness (PA) and nonword repetition. Few studies have investigated whether literacy acquisition also promotes children's rapid automatized naming (RAN). We tested the hypothesis that literacy acquisition should influence RAN in an international, longitudinal population sample of twins. Cross‐lagged path models evaluated the relationships among literacy, PA, and RAN across four time points from pre‐kindergarten through grade 4. Consistent with previous research, literacy showed bidirectional relationships with reading‐related oral language skills. We found novel evidence for an effect of earlier literacy on later RAN, which was most evident in children at early phases of literacy development. In contrast, the influence of earlier RAN on later literacy was predominant among older children. These findings imply that the association between these two related skills is moderated by development. Implications for models of reading development and for dyslexia research are discussed.     

Development of the perception of musical relations: semitone and diatonic structure

In the present research we examined the development of sensitivity to two musical relations significant in Western tonal music, the semitone and diatonic structure. Infants and preschool children were tested for their detection of a semitone change in any position of a five-note melody. Two standard melodies were used, one composed of diatonic tones only and the other containing a non-diatonic tone. In Experiment 1, children from 4 to 6 years of age were superior in detecting the semitone change in the diatonic context compared with the nondiatonic context. In Experiment 2, infants 9 to 11 months of age detected the semitone change in all positions, but their performance was not influenced by diatonic context. These findings indicate that infants and children can discriminate a semitone in a musical context and that the priority of diatonic structure emerges by 4 to 6 years of age.     

From terrible twos to sassy sixes: The development of vocabulary and executive functioning across early childhood

Across the early childhood period of development, young children exhibit considerable growth in their executive functioning (EF) and vocabulary abilities. Understanding the developmental trajectory of these seemingly interrelated processes is important as both early vocabulary and EF have been shown to predict critical academic and socio-emotional outcomes later in childhood. Although previous research suggests that EF and vocabulary are correlated in early childhood, much of the existing longitudinal research has focused on unidirectional relations among preschool child samples. The current large-scale study, therefore, sought to examine whether children's vocabulary and EF abilities are bidirectionally related over time across four measurement waves in early childhood (i.e., at ages 2, 3, 4, and 6). At each timepoint, children's vocabulary skills were positively correlated with their concurrent EF abilities. After controlling for child sex and maternal education status, the best-fitting, cross-lagged panel model was a unidirectional model whereby children's early vocabulary scores predicted their later EF performance at each timepoint. Although age 2 EF significantly predicted age 3 vocabulary size, this association was no longer significant after accounting for maternal education status. Our results illustrate that vocabulary size plays an important role in predicting children's later EF performance across various timepoints in early childhood, even after controlling for children's initial EF scores. These findings have important implications for intervention research as fostering early vocabulary acquisition may serve as a possible avenue for improving EF outcomes in young children.

Research Highlights

• Children's vocabulary size is positively correlated with their concurrent executive functioning skill at ages 2, 3, 4, and 6
• Young children's early vocabulary scores predict their later EF performance across measurement waves, even after controlling for initial EF skill
• There is stability in children's relative vocabulary size and executive functioning performance over time in early childhood

     

Developmental dynamics between mathematical performance,task motivation,and teachers' goals during the transition to primary school

Background. It has been suggested that children's learning motivation and interest in a particular subject play an important role in their school performance, particularly in mathematics. However, few cross‐lagged longitudinal studies have been carried out to investigate the prospective relationships between academic achievement and task motivation. Moreover, the role that the classroom context plays in this development is largely unknown. Aims. The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental dynamics of maths‐related motivation and mathematical performance during children's transition to primary school. The role of teachers' pedagogical goals and classroom characteristics on this development was also investigated. Sample. A total of 196 Finnish children were examined four times: (0) in October during their preschool year; (1) in October and (2) April during their first grade of primary school; and (3) in October during their second grade. Method. Children's mathematical performance was tested at each measurement point. Task motivation was examined at measurement points 2, 3, and 4 using the Task‐value scale for children. First‐grade teachers were interviewed in November about their pedagogical goals and classroom characteristics. Results and conclusions. The results showed that children's mathematical performance and related task motivation formed a cumulative developmental cycle: a high level of maths performance at the beginning of the first grade increased subsequent task motivation towards mathematics, which further predicted a high level of maths performance at the beginning of the second grade. The level of maths‐related task motivation increased in those classrooms where the teachers emphasized motivation or self‐concept development as their most important pedagogical goal.     

Integration of internal and external facial features in 8- to 10-year-old children and adults

Investigation of whole-part and composite effects in 4- to 6-year-old children gave rise to claims that face perception is fully mature within the first decade of life (Crookes & McKone, 2009). However, only internal features were tested, and the role of external features was not addressed, although external features are highly relevant for holistic face perception (Sinha & Poggio, 1996; Axelrod & Yovel, 2010, 2011). In this study, 8- to 10-year-old children and adults performed a same–different matching task with faces and watches. In this task participants attended to either internal or external features. Holistic face perception was tested using a congruency paradigm, in which face and non-face stimuli either agreed or disagreed in both features (congruent contexts) or just in the attended ones (incongruent contexts). In both age groups, pronounced context congruency and inversion effects were found for faces, but not for watches. These findings indicate holistic feature integration for faces. While inversion effects were highly similar in both age groups, context congruency effects were stronger for children. Moreover, children's face matching performance was generally better when attending to external compared to internal features. Adults tended to perform better when attending to internal features. Our results indicate that both adults and 8- to 10-year-old children integrate external and internal facial features into holistic face representations. However, in children's face representations external features are much more relevant. These findings suggest that face perception is holistic but still not adult-like at the end of the first decade of life.     

Middle- and Working-Class Black and White Children's Speech During a Picture-Labeling Task

The speech of 9 middle-class Black, 9 middle-class White, 9 working-class Black, and 9 working-class White preschool children was examined during a picture labeling task. The groups were found to be similar in levels and forms of labeling. There were class differences and race differences among the children: Middle-class and White children labeled more and provided more information about objects. Existing data from the children's parents indicate that there are many ways in which the groups of children resemble and differ from their parents in their labeling. The present findings demonstrate the influence of social context in shaping children's labeling and the simultaneous influence of the children's independent structuring of their labeling.     

Emotional Valence Precedes Semantic Maturation of Words: A Longitudinal Computational Study of Early Verbal Emotional Anchoring

We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children's and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children's word representations were used to set a mapping function between amodal and emotional word representations with a neural network model using ratings from 9-year-old children. The neural network was trained and validated in the child semantic space. Then, the resulting neural network was tested with adult word representations using ratings from an adult data set. Samples of 1210 and 5315 words were used in the child and the adult semantic spaces, respectively. Results suggested that the emotional valence of words can be predicted from amodal vector representations even at the child stage, and accurate emotional propagation was found in the adult word vector representations. In this way, different propagative processes were observed in the adult semantic space. These findings highlight a potential mechanism for early verbal emotional anchoring. Moreover, different multiple linear regression and mixed-effect models revealed moderation effects for the performance of the longitudinal computational model. First, words with early maturation and subsequent semantic definition promoted emotional propagation. Second, an interaction effect between age of acquisition and abstractness was found to explain model performance. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.