Sleep and Negative Affect Across Toddlerhood in the Context of Stress.

Negative affect is associated with both high stress and poor sleep, but questions remain about the direction of these associations across time and interactions between stress and sleep, especially in early childhood. The present study examined sleep deficits, family stress, and observed negative affect in a sample of toddlers at 30, 36, and 42 months ( = 504). Negative affect was observed during a parent-child free play task.

Heterotypic continuity of inhibitory control in early childhood: Evidence from four widely used measures.

Inhibitory control has been widely studied in association with social and academic adjustment. However, prior studies have generally overlooked the potential heterotypic continuity of inhibitory control and how this could affect assessment and understanding of its development. In the present study, we systematically considered heterotypic continuity in four well-established measures of inhibitory control, testing two competing hypotheses: (a) the manifestation of inhibitory control coheres within and across time in consistent, relatively simple ways, consistent with homotypic continuity.

Sustained attention across toddlerhood: The roles of language and sleep.

The present study examined individual differences in the development of sustained attention across toddlerhood, as well as how these individual differences related to the development of language and sleep. Toddlers (N = 314; 54% male) were assessed at 30, 36, and 42 months using multiple measures of attention, a standardized language assessment, and actigraphic measures of sleep. Toddlers were 80% White.

The Family Context of Toddler Sleep: Routines, Sleep Environment, and Emotional Security Induction in the Hour before Bedtime.

Family processes during the pre-bedtime period likely have a crucial influence on toddler sleep, but relatively little previous research has focused on family process in this context. The current study examined several aspects of family process during the pre-bedtime period, including the use of bedtime routines, the qualities of the child's home sleep environment, and the promotion of child emotional security, in families of 30-month-old toddlers (= 546; 265 female) who were part of a multi-site longitudinal study of toddler development. These characteristics were quantified using a combination of parent- and observer-reports and examined in association with child sleep using correlation and multiple regression.

Sleep across early childhood: implications for internalizing and externalizing problems, socioemotional skills, and cognitive and academic abilities in preschool.

Background: Sleep is thought to be important for behavioral and cognitive development. However, much of the prior research on sleep's role in behavioral/cognitive development has relied upon self-report measures and cross-sectional designs.

Methods: The current study examined how early childhood sleep, measured actigraphically, was developmentally associated with child functioning at 54 months.

Examining the Associations Between Performance Based and Ratings of Focused Attention in Toddlers: Are We Measuring the Same Constructs?

The study examines the concurrent and longitudinal associations between ratings-based measures (parents, secondary caregivers, observers) and performance-based measures of focused attention in toddlers aged 30- ( = 147), 36- ( =127), and 42-months ( =107). Parents and secondary caregivers rated focused attention behaviors using the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001), and observers rated toddlers' focused attention during a series of laboratory tasks using the Leiter-R Examiner Rating Scale (Roid & Miller, 1997).

Night-to-Night Variability in the Bedtime Routine Predicts Sleep in Toddlers.

The present study examined relations between nightly bedtime routines and sleep outcome measures in a sample of 185 toddlers aged 30 months. Parents reported on their toddler's sleep duration and the length and activities included in the bedtime routine each night for approximately 2 weeks. Toddlers wore actigraphs to track their sleep during the same time period.

Child Sleep and Socioeconomic Context in the Development of Cognitive Abilities in Early Childhood.

Despite a robust literature examining the association between sleep problems and cognitive abilities in childhood, little is known about this association in toddlerhood, a period of rapid cognitive development. The present study examined the association between various sleep problems, using actigraphy, and performance on a standardized test of cognitive abilities, longitudinally across three ages (30, 36, and 42 months) in a large sample of toddlers (N = 493). Results revealed a between-subject effect in which the children who had more delayed sleep schedules on average also showed poorer cognitive abilities on average but did not support a within-subjects effect.

Relations Between Toddler Sleep Characteristics, Sleep Problems, and Temperament.

Two sources of information (parent-reported sleep diaries and actigraph records) were used to investigate how toddler sleep characteristics (bed time/sleep onset, wake time/sleep offset, total nighttime sleep, and total sleep time) are related to sleep problems and temperament. There were 64 toddler participants in the study. Consistent with studies of older children, parent reports differed from actigraph-based records.

Estimating child sleep from parent report of time in bed: development and evaluation of adjustment approaches.

Objective: To develop and evaluate adjustment factors to convert parent-reported time in bed to an estimate of child sleep time consistent with objective measurement.

Methods: A community sample of 217 children aged 4-9 years (mean age = 6.6 years) wore actigraph wristwatches to objectively measure sleep for 7 days while parents completed reports of child sleep each night.

A one-hour sleep restriction impacts brain processing in young children across tasks: evidence from event-related potentials.

The effect of mild sleep restriction on cognitive functioning in young children is unclear, yet sleep loss may impact children's abilities to attend to tasks with high processing demands. In a preliminary investigation, six children (6.6-8.

Executive Function Skills of 6 to 8 Year Olds: Brain and Behavioral Evidence and Implications for School Achievement.

Academic and social success in school has been linked to children's self-regulation. This study investigated the assessment of the executive function (EF) component of self-regulation using a low-cost, easily administered measure to determine whether scores obtained from the behavioral task would agree with those obtained using a laboratory-based neuropsychological measure of EF skills. The sample included 74 children (37 females; M = 86.

Dynamic links between emerging cognitive skills and brain processes.

The goal of the present study was to investigate whether advanced cognitive skills in one domain impact the neural processing of unrelated skills in a different cognitive domain. This question is related to the broader issue of how cognitive-neurodevelopment proceeds as different skills are mastered. To address this goal, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to assess linkages between cognitive skills of preschool children as reflected in their performance on a pre-reading screening test (Get Ready To Read) and their neural responses while engaged in a geometric shape matching task.

Smoking during pregnancy affects speech-processing ability in newborn infants.

Background: Tobacco smoking during pregnancy is known to adversely affect development of the central nervous system in babies of smoking mothers by restricting utero-placental blood flow and the amount of oxygen available to the fetus. Behavioral data associate maternal smoking with lower verbal scores and poorer performance on specific language/auditory tests.

Objectives: In the current study we examined the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on newborns' speech processing ability as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs).

Below-average, average, and above-average readers engage different and similar brain regions while reading.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 27 children (14 girls, 13 boys) who varied in their reading skill levels. Both behavior performance measures recorded during the ERP word classification task and the ERP responses themselves discriminated between children with above-average, average, and below-average reading skills. ERP amplitudes and peak latencies decreased as reading skills increased.

Letter knowledge, phonological processing, and print knowledge: skill development in nonreading preschool children.

Development of reading skills was examined in 4-year-old children from low-income homes attending a prekindergarten program. Fall to spring gains in letter identification were examined and compared with skills in phonological processing, rhyme detection, and environmental print, and with performance on a screening tool (Get Ready to Read). It was anticipated that participants might show slow skill development.

Alphabetic skills in preschool: a preliminary study of letter naming and letter writing.

Development of letter naming and writing (skills in writing first name, dictated and copied letters, and dictated and copied numbers) was examined in 79 preschool children (M age = 56 months). Skills were assessed in the fall to determine the status of these procedural skills that are components of alphabetic knowledge at the start of the school year. Children with high letter-naming scores also had high scores on letter writing, including dictated or copied letters and writing some or all of the letters of their names.

Development of auditory event-related potentials in young children and relations to word-level reading abilities at age 8 years.

A relationship between brain responses at birth and later emerging language and reading skills have been shown, but questions remains whether changes in brain responses after birth continue to predict the mastery of language-related skills such as reading development. To determine whether developmental changes in the brain-based perceptual skills are systematically related to differences in word-level reading proficiency at age 8 years, brain event-related potentials (ERPs) to speech and non-speech stimuli were recorded annually at the ages of 1 through 8 years in a sample of 109 typically developing children. Two measures of word-level reading (one that requires decoding of real words and one of pseudowords) were administered at age 8 years.

The role of environment in the development of reading skills: a longitudinal study of preschool and school-age measures.

The purpose of this study was to extend previous studies on the influence of environmental measures on intelligence scores by examining how proximal and distal measures of children's environments in the preschool period and in the primary-grade period are related to their performance on reading achievement tests. Reading performance was explored using two approaches. The first approach involved the identification of children within a longitudinal sample who had poor reading skills at 8 years of age.

Snoring in preschoolers: associations with sleepiness, ethnicity, and learning.

Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) in children is associated with poor school performance, with minority children being at increased risk for both conditions. The latter have been attributable to low socio-economic status (SES). To further study these relationships, the contribution of SES to SDB and learning was examined in 1,010 validated questionnaires collected from parents of both white and African-American low-SES preschoolers.

Influence of environment on speech-sound discrimination: findings from a longitudinal study.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) from 134 children were obtained at 3 and 8 years of age and recorded to a series of consonant-vowel speech syllables and their nonspeech analogues. The HOME inventory was administered to these same children at 3 and 8 years of age and the sample was divided into 2 groups (low vs. high) based on their HOME scores.