The interrelatedness between infants’ communicative gestures and lexicon size: A longitudinal study

Research has shown a close relationship between gestures and language development. In this study, we investigate the cross-lagged relationships between different types of gestures and two lexicon dimensions: number of words produced and comprehended. Information about gestures and lexical development was collected from 48 typically developing infants when these were aged 0;9, 1;0 and 1;3. The European Portuguese version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures (PT CDI:WG) was used. The results indicated that the total number of actions and gestures and the number of early gestures produced at 0;9 and at 1;0 year predicted the number of words comprehended three months later. Actions and gestures’ predictive power of the number of words produced was limited to the 0;9–1;0 year interval. The opposite relationship was not found: word comprehension and production did not predict action and gestures three months later. These results highlight the importance of non-verbal communicative behavior in language development.     

The infant's developmental path in phonological acquisition

Research on how language acquisition begins has been fragmented both in terms of scientific communities and in terms of the phenomena that are taken to characterize developmental progress. In her article, Marilyn Vihman argues for an integrative approach that takes the child's efforts at speech production as primary, and notes that infants' knowledge of how words sound may accrue over a protracted period developmentally. Here, I briefly discuss how reconceptualization of the process can help integrate perspectives previously at odds.     

An associative account of the development of word learning

Word learning is a notoriously difficult induction problem because meaning is underdetermined by positive examples. How do children solve this problem? Some have argued that word learning is achieved by means of inference: young word learners rely on a number of assumptions that reduce the overall hypothesis space by favoring some meanings over others. However, these approaches have difficulty explaining how words are learned from conversations or text, without pointing or explicit instruction. In this research, we propose an associative mechanism that can account for such learning. In a series of experiments, 4-year-olds and adults were presented with sets of words that included a single nonsense word (e.g. dax). Some lists were taxonomic (i.,e., all items were members of a given category), some were associative (i.e., all items were associates of a given category, but not members), and some were mixed. Participants were asked to indicate whether the nonsense word was an animal or an artifact. Adults exhibited evidence of learning when lists consisted of either associatively or taxonomically related items. In contrast, children exhibited evidence of word learning only when lists consisted of associatively related items. These results present challenges to several extant models of word learning, and a new model based on the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations is proposed.     

Are All Kids Alike? The Magnitude of Individual Differences in Personality Characteristics Tends to Increase from Early Childhood to Early Adolescence

Do individual differences in personality traits become more or less pronounced over childhood and adolescence? The present research examined age differences in the variance of a range of personality traits, using parent reports of two large samples of children from predominantly the USA and Russia, respectively. Results indicate (i) that individual differences in most traits tend to increase with age from early childhood into early adolescence and then plateau, (ii) that this general pattern of greater personality variance at older childhood age is consistent across the two countries, and (iii) that this pattern is not an artefact of age differences in means or floor/ceiling effects. These findings are consistent with several (noncontradictory) developmental mechanisms, including youths' expanding behavioural capacities and person–environment transactions (corresponsive principle). However, these mechanisms may predominantly characterize periods before adolescence, or they may be offset by countervailing processes, such as socialization pressure towards a mature personality profile, in late adolescence and adulthood. Finally, the findings also suggest that interpreting age trajectories in mean trait scores as pertaining to age differences in a typical person may sometimes be misleading. Investigating variance should become an integral part of studying personality development. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

儿童社会观点采择的发展及其与同伴互动关系的研究

采用经过标准化处理的观点采择故事对幼儿园大班和小学二、四、六年级儿童的社会观点采择能力进行测量,利用录像观察技术和同伴评定法分别测定幼儿园大班和小学儿童的同伴社会互动经验,考察儿童社会观点采择的发展及其与同伴互动经验之间的关系。研究发现：（１）幼儿园大班儿童在准确采择他人观点方面还存在较大困难,６－１０岁为儿童社会观点采择能力快速发展的时期,１０岁左右的小学儿童能够根据有关事件信息准确推断他人的观     

大中小学生内隐序列学习的发展性研究

采用序列学习的研究范式,对大中小学生的序列反应时和序列生成成绩进行测量,结果表明:(1)大中小学生均能在序列学习中获得序列规则。(2)采用比例测量方法,大中小学生的序列反应时无显著差异。(3)大中小学生的序列生成成绩是不同的,包含成绩随着年级升高而上升,排除成绩则不随年级变化;小学生包含和排除成绩无显著差异,而中学生和大学生的差异逐渐加大。说明序列学习的意识成分随年级的升高而增加。     

对儿童认知发展水平诊断工具IPDT的信度效度检验

修订了以皮亚杰认知发展理论为基础的儿童认知发展诊断工具IPDT的信度效度资料,在390名北京小学生样本中的修订结果表明,该测验具有稳定的信度、良好的效度、适当的难度和理想的区分度,适合作为小学生认知发展诊断工具。对应用的范围、存在的问题和未来的研究需要进行了讨论。     

概念提示和音乐经验对音乐张力感知发展的影响

以小四、初二和高二年级中有音乐经验和无音乐经验的学生为被试,采用等级量表评定法,通过两个实验,分别在无概念提示和有概念提示的条件下,要求被试对音乐旋律片段的张力进行判断,探讨概念提示和音乐经验对于音乐张力感知的影响。结果发现：（1）音乐张力感知是一个随个体成熟而不断发展的过程,小学四年级到初中二年级之间音乐张力感知变化较大,到高中二年级趋于稳定;音乐训练经验仅对小学四年级被试的音乐张力感知有促进作用;（2）概念提示有助于小学四年级被试对音乐张力概念的理解,而对高二被试无显著促进作用,说明音乐张力概念的掌握     

阅读发展相关的认知技能：汉语和英语的比较

对英语和汉语阅读获得所需要的认知技能及发展性阅读障碍儿童认知缺陷的研究进行了回顾。分析表明阅读发展所需认知资源表现出了跨语言的一致性,都要求有充足的学习与记忆能力和正常的视觉正字法技能,语音和语义知识表征足够精细;阅读障碍儿童的主要认知缺陷也表现出了跨文字的一致性,都包括语音缺陷和一般的学习与记忆问题。然而儿童所面临的语言文字特性会影响到阅读技能获得的难易和发展性阅读障碍的表现