Tablet and Smartphone or a Book: The Struggle Between Digital Media and Literacy Environment in Homes of Croatian Preschool Children and Its Effect on Letter Recognition.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the amount of time that preschool children, aged 6-7 years, spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes, aspects of their home literacy environment (HLE), and their letter recognition ability. Participants in the study were a convenient sample of 97 children (43 girls) aged 6-7 years and one of their parents, who agreed to participate in the research during the process of school readiness assessment. Children completed a letter recognition test, while parents filled out a questionnaire in which they gave estimates of the amount of time their child typically spends using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week and completed a scale assessing their HLE. The results show that a smaller amount of time that children spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week, higher education level of mothers, and more frequent parental engagement in interactive reading with children are positively related to children's letter recognition. However, more frequent interactive reading with the child was the only significant predictor of better letter recognition. The findings point to the importance of time spent using digital devices for entertainment purposes by preschool children, as well as the quality of their home environment, in literacy development.

Family Functioning and Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Problems: Disentangling between-, and Within-Family Associations.

Adolescence is often a period of onset for internalizing and externalizing problems. At the same time, adolescent maturation and increasing autonomy from parents push for changes in family functioning. Even though theoretically expected links among the changes in family functioning and adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems exist, studies examining this link on the within-family level are lacking. This longitudinal, pre-registered, and open-science study, examined the within-family dynamic longitudinal associations among family functioning, and internalizing and externalizing problems. Greek adolescents (N = 480, Mage = 15.73, 47.9% girls, at Wave 1) completed self-report questionnaires, three times in 12 months. Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (RI-CLPM) were applied; such models explicitly disentangle between-family differences from within-family processes, thereby offering a more stringent examination of within-family hypotheses. Results showed that family functioning was not significantly associated with internalizing or externalizing problems, on the within-family level. Also, alternative standard Cross-Lagged Panel Models (CLPM) were applied; such models have been recently criticized for failing to explicitly disentangle between-family variance from within-family variance, but they have been the standard approach to investigating questions of temporal ordering. Results from these analyses offered evidence that adolescents with higher internalizing and externalizing problems compared to their peers, tended to be those who later experienced worse family functioning, but not vice versa. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Sex-specific age-related changes of information processing rate indicators during childhood and adolescence.

Despite the relevant findings on non-average information processing rate (IPR) indicators-intelligence relation, and on age-related changes of some of these indicators during aging, the research on sex-specific age-related changes of these indicators during childhood and adolescence are lacking. In a transversal study, 1197 school children (598 girls) aged 8-18 have been individually measured on 5 IPR indicators--two averages (mean_t, median_t) and three non-averages (min_t, max_t, sd_t). The results corroborated the expected non-linear changes of average IPR indicators in the observed developmental period, whereby the sex difference in related developmental patterns was detected: marked age-related decrement in girls ceased at the age of 12, and in boys around the age of 13-14, after which progress in both sexes gradually ceased by the age of 18 and was less pronounced in girls. Generally similar non-linear age-related decrements of non-average indicators were registered, but they showed mutual intensity differences at specific ages and sex difference in developmental patterns was detected, analogously to average indicators. Systematic sex differences in the whole observed period were obtained only in two non-average indicators: girls showed minor sd_t and boys showed minor min_t. In specific age groups, a number of sex differences were obtained that are explainable by two possible mechanisms: earlier maturation in girls and sex bias of the IPR task content. The justifiability of separate, average and non-average, IPR indicators application was corroborated by their distribution form differences, by mutual, predominantly low and medium correlations, by the different intensity of their developmental changes and by their different ability to detect sex differences. For all registered phenomena, the theoretical and/or empirical explanations were offered from the domain of sex specific intellectual, motor and neural development, and it has been shown that non-average IPR indicators do register age and sex differences, which average indicators do not manage to register.