Early lexical development of children raised in institutional care in Russia

Children abandoned to institutions display a host of developmental delays, including those involving general cognition and language. The majority of published studies focus on children over 3 years of age; little is known about whether these delays may be detected earlier when children undergo rapid lexical development. To investigate the early language development of children raised in institutional settings in the Russian Federation, we compared a group of children in institutional care (n = 36; 8–35 months) to their age-matched peers raised in biological families, who have never been institutionalized (n = 72) using the Russian version of the CDI. The results suggest that institutionalization is associated with pronounced delays in children's early language development with large and robust effect sizes. Among children with a history of institutionalization, these delays are also associated with difficulties in Daily Living skills, communication, and socialization.     

Predictors of age-related and individual variability in autobiographical memory in childhood

ABSTRACT

Development of autobiographical memory is as a gradual process beginning in early childhood and continuing through late adolescence. Substantial attention has been paid to early childhood when first personal memories are formed; less attention has been focused on the flourishing of memories from the late preschool years onward. We addressed this void with a three-year cohort-sequential study of age-related changes in the length, completeness, and coherence of autobiographical narratives by children 4–10 years. We also examined the unique and combined variance in autobiographical narrative explained by children’s own language, maternal narrative style, domain-general cognitive abilities, non-autobiographical story recall, and memory-specific skills. There was substantial growth in autobiographical narrative skill across the 4–10-year period. Non-autobiographical story recall was a strong concurrent and cross-lagged predictor for all autobiographical narrative measures. Memory-specific and domain-general cognitive abilities systematically predicted narrative completeness and coherence but not length. Children’s language and maternal narrative style did not contribute additional variance when these predictors were considered. The findings highlight that age-related changes in autobiographical memory are the results of combined contributions of a variety of domain-general and domain-specific predictors.     

Development of navigational working memory: Evidence from 6‐ to 10‐year‐old children

The ability to learn complex environments may require the contribution of different types of working memory. Therefore, we investigated the development of different types of working memory (navigational, reaching, and verbal) in 129 typically developing children. We aimed to determine whether navigational working memory develops at the same rate as other types of working memory and whether the gender differences reported in adults are already present during development. We found that navigational working memory is less developed than both verbal and reaching working memory and that gender predicts performance only for navigational working memory. Our results are in line with reports that children made significantly more errors in far space than adults, showing that near space representation develops before far space representation.