The cover image is based on the Original Article How chimpanzees and children perceive other species’ bodies: comparing the expert effect by Jie Gao and Masaki Tomonaga., https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12975.

Our study demonstrates that children who develop dyslexia (DYS+) differ from typically developing children (FRD-DYS-) with regard to subcortical neural synchronization (80 Hz ASSRs) prior to reading instruction. The inability to synchronize subcortical activity thus seems to predispose certain children to the development of dyslexia.

Our longitudinal study is the first to reveal that neural phase entrainment to the delta components of speech already occurs at four years of age. Moreover, we show that, at seven years of age, delta speech-brain entrainment is still bilateral, suggesting that right-hemispheric specialisation for the perception of speech slow components is not in place.

Changes in blood oxygenation in the frontal lobe varied in toddlers depending on whether they saw gestures or heard speech, and depending on whether those gestures or speech were meaningful or nonmeaningful. This varied between 2- and 3-year-olds, and for 2-year-olds, predicted later language measures.

Developing readers of four alphabetic orthographies (i.e. English, French, German, Italian) read aloud morphologically structured and non-morphologically structured nonwords. English is the least consistent language, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, and the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. English readers showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, which suggests that the orthographic consistency of a language, and not its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used in reading.

Dynamic temporal prediction (DTP) task. The DTP task is a simple, warned reaction time task purposely designed to investigate the implicit cognitive flexibility induced by the transition between local (within-trial expectancy) and global (between-block probabilistic rules overcoming local transitions) predictive contexts.

We investigated whether domain general processes such as memory interference can account for infants' and adults' anticipatory looks in a false belief task. In our agent condition, participants were shown short animations of an agent triangle chasing a disk. In a control condition, they were shown a stimulus involving an inert triangle held by a hand. In contrast with domain general accounts of anticipatory looks, both infants and adults showed a reliable bias toward the belief congruent location in the agent condition and they showed no bias in the control condition.

Evidence from Bayesian analyses suggests that symbolic number comparison accuracy and spatial working memory were specific predictors of math achievement and symbolic number comparison reaction time and verbal memory were predictors of both reading and math. Approximate number system measures were not reliable predictors of math.

During a dissimulated guessing game, children aged 7 to 12 spoke louder and used lengthier explanations when they talked to an old compared to a young interlocutor. These results are a first indication of child speech accommodation toward older people.

We assessed monolingual and bilingual infants' abilities to segment dual speech streams using syllable co-occurence cues despite syllable overlap. We found that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, successfully segmented the speech and that bilinguals' language environments were associated with their performance.

The ability to disengage attention is associated with language ability in typically and atypically developing infants and toddlers. Contrary to previous reports, this ability to disengage attention is impaired in Down syndrome. The impairment may therefore contribute to their language delay.

Tracking people's knowledge can be challenging for children. We find evidence that children use social relationships when making inferences about knowledge. Specifically, children expect friends to have shared personal knowledge (e.g., secrets), and expect siblings and members of a national group to have shared cultural knowledge (e.g., how to celebrate a holiday). Moreover, with age, children become increasingly likely to consider both the type of relationship and the type of knowledge when determining who knows what.

Does learning about a novel word in the context of other semantically similar known objects confuse or support young word learnings? The study explores this question by pairing novel (i.e unfamiliar) words (like boba) with known ones (like juice, see Fig) and asking how 2-year-olds retain these words during a later test. The findings suggest that although children might not initially identify the appropriate word during the learning (disambiguation) trials, that having a denser network of semantically similar words supports later retention.

This study aims at evaluating trainings to reduce math anxiety (MA) and improve math abilities. Results indicate that MA training contributes to a decrease in MA level, but only Math strategy training showed a reduction of MA level as well as an improvement of math abilities.

The relation between expressive vocabulary (EV) and the development of early word–object associations was investigated in TD infants and infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder associated with delayed language and cognitive development. Eleven- to 14-month-old TD infants and 12- to 35-month-olds with WS were divided into small and large EV groups and tested on a “switch” task using phonetically dissimilar words and novel objects. Across both populations, the results were similar: infants in the small EV group processed the novel object, while infants in the large EV group processed the words, objects, and the word-object links (as tested with the switch trial).

This study shows for the first time that encouraging 5- to 6-year-old children to produce beat gestures in a brief narrative training task helps them to improve their subsequent narrative performance, in terms of narrative structure and fluency scores.

In Spanish-English sequential bilingual children, we demonstrate that speed of language processing in Spanish at 2 years is uniquely linked to both Spanish- and English-language outcomes at 4 ½ years. Strong native-language real-time processing abilities early in development reflect skills that support later learning in both a native language and a second language.

This study investigated the evolutionary and developmental aspects of body perception. Chimpanzees show the inversion effect to their conspecifics, and we found their inversion effect to bodies of other species, with which they have visual or embodied experience. We report the body inversion effect in children for the first time. They also show the inversion effect to other species, suggesting the role of experience in shaping visual perception.

Mental imagery involves the inner assembly of external experiences and events, to then behold these in front of our ‘inner eye’. Screen-media do much of this work for us by providing us with ready-made images. Accordlingy, children who spend more time with screens show reduced mental imagery performance.

This longitudinal study examines the unique influences of executive function and maternal support at 14 months on externalizing behavior at 24 months. Cross-lagged analysis show that poor executive function at 14 months predicts externalizing behaviors at 24 months (but not vice versa). High levels of maternal support at 14 months predict reduced externalizing behaviors at 24 months among infants with low levels of negative affect.

This study shows that neurofeedback effects on inhibitory control in AD(H)D depends on the clinical subtype. Neurofeedback effects differ between ADHD and ADD subtypes.

Cognitive control develops rapidly during childhood, with a dominant change being a transition from ‘as-needed’ control (reactive control) to planful control (proactive control). This study shows that working memory, above and beyond other executive functions, is critical for the enactment of proactive control during childhood. In addition, we show memory-related neural activity (P3b) links working memory ability and proactive control strategy use. Together, these data suggest that neurocognitive developments in working memory may influence adopting a more mature, and adaptive, proactive cognitive control strategy.

We investigated the intergenerational transmission of mathematics achievement using a prospective adoption design. Results indicate that heritable (i.e., birth parent mathematics achievement scores) and environmental (i.e., adoptive father, but not mother, mathematics achievement scores) factors contribute to mathematics achievement in middle childhood.

Infants of mothers with evidence of higher physiological stress showed increased relative low-frequency (theta) power and reduced relative high-frequency (alpha, high-gamma) power, compared to infants of mothers with evidence of low physiological stress. These findings are consistent with a maturational lag in brain development. Maturational lags can be long-lasting and are associated with deficits in cognitive and emotional development.