Cumulative contextual risk, maternal responsivity, and social cognition at 18 months.

By 18 months children demonstrate a range of social-cognitive skills that can be considered important precursors to more advanced forms of social understanding such as theory of mind. Although individual differences in social cognition have been linked to neurocognitive maturation, sociocultural models of development suggest that environmental influences operate in the development of children's social-cognitive outcomes. In the current study of 501 children and their mothers, we tested and found support for a model in which distal environmental risk, assessed when children were newborns, was indirectly associated with children's social-cognitive competency at 18 months through mothers' responsivity at 18 months.

Development of the deontic advantage in reasoning: reply to Cummins.

In response to Cummins's report that comments on our article (Dack & Astington, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011, Vol. 110, pp. 94-114), this article clarifies our perspective on what constitutes the deontic advantage, and notes similarities and differences between Cummins's perspective and our own.

Bridging the gap between implicit and explicit understanding: how language development promotes the processing and representation of false belief.

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the development of false-belief reasoning. In the current paper, we argue that children's performance on disparate measures cannot be used to infer similarities in understanding across different age groups.

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children.

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this "deontic advantage" in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neither study has been replicated, and it is not clear from either study that preschoolers were showing the deontic advantage under the same conditions as adults.

Children's understanding of social-cognitive and social-communicative aspects of discourse irony.

To bridge the social-reasoning focus of developmental research on irony understanding and the pragmatic focus of research with adult populations, this cross-sectional study examines 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (n = 72) developing understanding of both social-cognitive and social-communicative aspects of discourse irony, when compared with adults (n = 24). Although 5-year-olds lag behind the other age groups in their reasoning about the speaker's meaning, belief, intention, and motivation, adults are consistently superior to children of all ages on these social-cognitive measures. In contrast, limited age-related differences were found in participants' judgment of the social-communicative function of irony (how nice, mean, and funny irony is).