Educational relevance and implications of spatial development in early childhood.

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The Theoretical and Methodological Opportunities Afforded by Guided Play With Young Children

For infants and young children, learning takes place all the time and everywhere. How children learn best both in and out of school has been a long-standing topic of debate in education, cognitive development, and cognitive science. Recently, guided play has been proposed as an integrative approach for thinking about learning as a child-led, adult-assisted playful activity. The interactive and dynamic nature of guided play presents theoretical and methodological challenges and opportunities. Drawing upon research from multiple disciplines, we discuss the integration of cutting-edge computational modeling and data science tools to address some of these challenges, and highlight avenues toward an empirically grounded, computationally precise and ecologically valid framework of guided play in early education

Word learning in infant-and adult-directed speech

Infant-directed speech (IDS), compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), is characterized by a slower rate, a higher fundamental frequency, greater pitch variations, longer pauses, repetitive into-national structures, and shorter sentences. Despite studies on the properties of IDS, there is no direct demonstration of its effects for word learning in infants. This study examined whether 21- and 27-month-old children learned novel words better in IDS than in ADS. Two major findings emerged. First, 21-month-olds reliably learned words only in the IDS condition, although children with relatively larger vocabulary than their peers learned in the ADS condition as well. Second, 27-month-olds reliably learned the words in the ADS condition. These results support the implicitly held assumption that IDS does in fact facilitate word mapping at the start of lexical acquisition and that its influence wanes as language development proceeds.17 page(s

Where music meets space: Children's sensitivity to pitch intervals is related to their mental spatial transformation skills

Relations have been found among various continuous dimensions, including space and musical pitch. To probe the nature and development of space-pitch mappings, we tested 5- to 7-year-olds and adults (N=69), who heard pitch intervals and were asked to choose the corresponding spatial representation. Results showed that children and adults both mapped pitches continuously onto space, although effects were stronger in older than younger children. Additionally, children's spatial and numerical skills were tested, showing a relation between children's spatial and pitch-matching skills, and between their spatial and numerical skills. However, pitch and number were not related, suggesting spatial underpinnings for pitch and number

A world of relations: Relational words

Children climb on jungle gyms, run around trees, and kiss their parents. The everyday world in which we live is fundamentally dynamic, with events defined in terms of the relations that objects have to actions. When we label these events and relations, we use relational words that come in all forms. They can be nouns such as brother, island, and passenge