The rise in children’s media use (Rideout & Robb, 2020) and the prioritization of STEM learning (Fayer et al., 2017) has led to the development of new STEM-related apps, TV shows, and other media for young children. One topic in this area gaining popularity is computational thinking (CT). Researchers refer...
Over the past decade the market for children’s digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for...
Much of our understanding of human becoming and the process by which possible futures are developed has been based on narrow samples of human experience, which are usually more privileged and provide a narrow view of variability in human life and development. The developmental and educational pathways of minoritized young...
Gerotranscendence involves feelings of coherence with one’s sense of self, greater acceptance of one’s own life, and connectedness to others across time and space. Gerotranscendence is thought to increase with age. The present study is the first longitudinal effort to investigate changes in gerotranscendence across late midlife using life story...
Learning to read is a complex process that requires integration across sensory, cognitive, and linguistic processes. Accordingly, there are numerous process that may lead to early reading difficulties. The earlier these difficulties are found, the more effective interventions can be, and the deleterious effects of falling behind in reading cannot...
Children acquire linguistic competence via social interactions with adults and learn to converse in accordance with the norms of their communities. The present dissertation examined the communicative patterns of Thai-English bilingual mothers and children in their two languages, as well as compared the bilinguals’ conversations to each of their monolingual...
Individuals with psychotic disorders experience profound challenges in maintaining a coherent sense of self and identity over time. Although disturbances in the basic, momentary sense of self are core features of psychotic experiences, less is known about psychosis’s impact on the autobiographical self, the experience of being a coherent and...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
Late talkers (LTs) are a heterogenous group of children who experience delayed language development in the absence of other known causes (Fisher, 2017). Many LTs “catch up” to their typically talking peers (TTs), but some go on to experience continued difficulties with speech and language development (Dale & Hayiou-Thomas, 2013),...
Humans are prodigious learners. One of our most powerful learning tools is the ability to detect and transfer relational similarities between items and events, despite their perceptual differences. Previous research has found that the roots of this ability extend into infancy. As early as three months of age, infants can...