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Correlated longitudinal changes across linguistic, achievement, and psychomotor domains in early childhood: evidence for a global dimension of development
Author(s) -
Rhemtulla Mijke,
TuckerDrob Elliot M.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01071.x
Subject(s) - psychomotor learning , psychology , dimension (graph theory) , language development , developmental psychology , early childhood , language acquisition , child development , longitudinal study , cognitive psychology , cognition , mathematics education , statistics , mathematics , neuroscience , pure mathematics
An important question within developmental psychology concerns the extent to which the maturational gains that children make across multiple diverse domains of functioning can be attributed to global (domain‐general) developmental processes. The present study investigated this question by examining the extent to which individual differences in change across children’s development in five different domains are correlated. Multivariate growth‐curve models were fit to longitudinal data on linguistic, mathematics, reading, gross motor, and fine motor skills in 8950 children ranging in age from 44 to 86 months (3.7 years to 7.2 years). All five rates of change were positively intercorrelated. A common factor accounted for 42% of the individual differences in change. These results suggest that a global dimension underlies substantial proportions of cognitive and psychomotor development.