Structure and continuity of intellectual development in early childhood

Abstract

We evaluated over 200 participants semiannually from 12 to 48 months of age on measures of intellectual (Bayley Scales, Stanford-Binet Scale) and verbal (MacArthur-Bates Inventory, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) status. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear (growth curve) analyses were applied to address the nature of development and individual differences during this time. Structural analyses showed a strong and robust simplex model from infancy to the preschool period, with no evidence of qualitative reorganizations or discontinuities. Growth-curve modeling revealed significant associations between level factors across the early and later measures of cognition, providing further evidence of continuity; the growth trajectory from the Bayley through 24 months predicted growth in a nonverbal factor, but not in a verbal factor. Altogether, the findings reveal continuous and stable development in intellectual function from late infancy through the preschool years. Additionally, the high level of continuity demonstrated across these ages was observed to be largely independent of growth in vocabulary.The study of intellect and its development continues to be a primary focus in the area of psychology (e.g., Bornstein, Slater, Brown, Roberts, & Barrett, 1997; Craik & Bialystock, 2006;Lewis, 1976). The traditional view of early intellectual development (see Bayley, 1940;Honzik, 1976;Hunt, 1967;Hunt & Bayley, 1971) has long championed the view that early measures of developmental status were unrelated to later intelligence. A modified view of this position emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting that the first two years of life featured periods of discontinuous development due to reorganizations of cognitive function Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to John Colombo (colombo@ku.edu) or Todd Little (yhat@ku.edu) at Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS 66045-7555. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptIntelligence. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1. McCall, 1976McCall, , 1983 McCall, Eichhorn, & Hogarty, 1977;McCall, Hogarty, & Hurlburt, 1972;Lewis, 1973).The view of discontinuity and reorganization was initially challenged during the 1980s and 1990s, with repeated findings showing that discrete indices of attention, memory, and speed of encoding or processing were modestly but significantly correlated with more mature forms of intelligence (see reviews by Bornstein & Sigman, 1986;Colombo, 1993;McCall, 1994;McCall & Carriger, ...

Information processing in toddlers: Continuity from infancy and persistence of preterm deficits☆

“…Cross-age correlations between the infant and toddler years also tended to be significant, mainly in the 20s and 30s, consistent with the notion that the toddler abilities have their origin in infancy. These findings complement those that found continuity beginning at 12 months for psychometric tests (Blaga et al, 2009; Humphreys & Davey, 1988). The present results extend these findings by showing that (a) similar continuities exist for a wide variety of elementary information processing abilities, and (b) continuities for these elementary abilities have roots even earlier in the first year of life.…”

“…As noted above, the transition from the first year of life to the toddler period is not well understood (Blaga et al, 2009). Indeed, less is known about the second year of life than about any other phase of the life span (Reznick, Corley, & Robinson, 1997) and, with the exception of recent work on recall memory (Bauer, 2002, 2006; Bauer, Wiebe, Carver, Waters, & Nelson, 2003; Hayne, 2004), data on basic information processing in toddlers is largely absent.…”

Differentiation of cognitive abilities across the life span.

“…Such questions have been partially addressed in some past work (e.g. Blaga et al, 2009; Hertzog, Dixon, Hultsch, & MacDonald, 2003; Wilson et al, 2002), and are a primary theme of my ongoing research.…”

Human Infancy...and the Rest of the Lifespan

“…In addition, growing sophistication in the statistical armamentarium for estimating stability and prediction across time has welcomed latent growth curve modeling (Asendorpf & van Aken 1999, Blaga et al 2009, Bridgett et al 2009, Bridgett & Mayes 2011, Hill-Soderlund & Braungart-Rieker 2008, Pasco, Fearon, & Belsky 2011), path analysis (Bornstein et al 2006, LaBuda, DeFries, Plomin, & Fulker 1986), hierarchical linear modeling (Bada et al 2007, Shafir, Angulo-Barroso, Calatroni, Jimenez, & Lozoff 2006), and hazard analyses (Frank et al 2011). For temporally distal, developmental processes, moreover, tests of indirect paths between predictors and criteria are sometimes more sensitive, powerful, and theoretically appropriate than tests of simple direct relations (Shrout & Bolger 2002).…”