Abstract Although authorship is central to the career advancement of many ecologists, the processes used to assign authorship credit on papers are not always clear, ethical, or equitable. We developed the concept of authorship climate (perceptions of fairness related to procedures, communication practices, and outcomes of authorship decisions) and measured it using a survey of early‐career scientists from four fields across U.S. Ph.D.‐granting institutions. The results pointed to important differences in authorship climate perceptions across fields, career stages, and demographics. This paper provides an overview of the results, especially for the field of biology that encompasses ecology, and provides recommendations for improving authorship climate for ecologists.

A growing literature uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate novel metaphor processing as a window into creative processes like conceptual expansion. Modulations of the N400 generally indicate that while novel metaphors are initially processed as semantic anomalies, after a connection is found relating the concepts, they pattern more with literal sentences. Existing research largely focuses on monolinguals, but less is known about novel metaphor processing in bilinguals' second language (L2). Here, we combine robust single-trial ERPs and behavioral measures to investigate how L2 English users process full-sentence novel metaphors. We compare our results to a previous study with English monolinguals using the same experimental design to test three competing hypotheses: L2 conceptual expansion will be more effortful than, more efficient than, or similar to L1. Group differences suggest more effortful processing for L2 English users than monolinguals. Behaviorally, L2 users show more sentence evaluation errors than monolinguals, particularly for anomalous sentences. ERP results in L2 users reveal an N400 semantic anomaly effect at the sentence-final position, with no significant differences between metaphorical and literal or metaphorical and anomalous sentences. Monolinguals show a graded N400 effect, with significant differences between literal and anomalous as well as metaphorical and anomalous sentences. By comparing L2 users' results with monolingual English users and using naturalistic full-sentence structures, our findings contribute to the emergent literature on L2 novel metaphor processing and conceptual expansion while also unraveling the cognitive challenges associated with incremental processing and integration of L2 metaphorical sentences.

Children's participation in cultural, everyday practices and social interactions involving math and money can contribute to the development of their knowledge and skills in these domains. Further work is needed to uncover what features of these activities, such as aspects of the conversations that may occur (e.g., number and money talk), facilitate and/or are shaped by children's understanding of money concepts and skills. The present study examined the extent to which parents engaged in conversations about numbers and money with their four-year-old children during pretend grocery play and the relations to children's math skills. We found that talk about price labeling and exchanging currency or goods occurred most frequently and that money and number talk were not significantly related to children's broader math skills. However, parents' money talk was positively associated with children's money-related math skills, and this association was driven by the co-occurrence of talk about money and numbers. Our results suggest that parent-child conversations in familiar contexts such as grocery shopping provide rich opportunities to discuss culturally relevant practices surrounding money and practice math skills in the context of monetary exchanges. Thus, it is critical to consider how existing family practices and everyday contexts support children's early math learning.

Children's screen time (ST) increased in recent years, but investigations of the content and context (e.g., parental presence, and device type) of ST in predicting early academic skills remains understudied. In this study of 127 four- and five-year-olds, we examined whether the educational content and contextual information about children's ST from time diary interviews at age 4 predicted direct assessments of academic skills at age five. Cluster analyses detected three unique groups: Cluster One was "lowest ST and highest non-educational TV, with little parental presence," Cluster Two was "moderate ST and highest educational mobile devices, with moderate parental presence," and Cluster Three was "highest total ST and moderate educational ST and high parental presence." Children in Cluster Two scored significantly higher in literacy skills at age five than peers in Cluster One and Cluster Three. Children in Cluster One scored significantly higher in spatial skills compared to those in Cluster Three. No significant associations were detected between children's ST and number skills. Findings suggest that educational content and contextual features of ST combine in meaningful ways and appear to better predict children's literacy and spatial skills compared to variable-centered approaches. Methodological implications of this research and future directions are discussed.

Mounting evidence suggests that home engagement in mathematics is related to variability in early math skill. Although prior work has investigated parental predictors of home math engagement more broadly, it remains understudied whether the same factors relate to toddlers' home math environment, and if home math experiences are associated with toddlers' math skills. Here we asked whether parents' beliefs, attitudes, and experiences with math relate to their engagement in home numeracy and spatial activities with toddlers and are associated with toddlers' developing number and spatial skills (N = 189). We find that a broad range of parent factors, including parents' beliefs about the importance of math, math growth mindset beliefs, math anxiety, and math coursework, predicts parents' frequency of engaging in numeracy activities with toddlers. Furthermore, home number activities predicted toddlers' number skills. Parents' math beliefs, attitudes, and experiences all had positive indirect effects on toddlers' number skills through associations with number activities. However, none of these parent factors predicted home spatial activities, and we saw no association between home spatial activities and toddlers' spatial skills. Altogether, these results suggest that even at very young ages, parent factors shape the home environment and toddlers' early numeracy learning, but we did not detect associations for spatial skills.

Preschoolers' mathematics knowledge develops early and varies substantially. The current study focused on two ontogenetically early emerging cognitive skills that may be important predictors of later math skills (i.e., geometry and numeracy): children's understanding of abstract relations between objects and quantities as evidenced by their patterning skills and the approximate number system (ANS). Children's patterning skills, the ANS, numeracy, geometry, nonverbal intelligence (IQ), and executive functioning (EF) skills were assessed at age 4 years, and their numeracy and geometry knowledge was assessed again a year later at age 5 (N = 113). Above and beyond children's initial knowledge in numeracy and geometry, as well as IQ and EF, patterning skills and the ANS at age 4 uniquely predicted children's geometry knowledge at age 5, but only age 4 patterning uniquely predicted age 5 numeracy. Thus, although patterning and the ANS are related, they differentially explain variation in later geometry and numeracy knowledge. Results are discussed in terms of implications for early mathematics theory and research. (c) 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.

Children's spatial activities and parental spatial talk were measured to examine their associations with variability in preschoolers' spatial skills (N = 113, M-age = 4 years, 4 months; 51% female; 80% White, 11% Black, and 9% other). Parents who reported more diversity in daily spatial activities and used longer spatial talk utterances during a spatial activity had children with greater gains in spatial skills from ages 4 to 5 (beta = .17 and beta = .40, respectively). Importantly, this study is the first to move beyond frequency counts of spatial input and investigate the links among the diversity of children's daily spatial activities, as well as the complexity of parents' spatial language across different contexts, and preschoolers' gains in spatial skills, an important predictor of later STEM success.

Social interactions are defined by the dynamic and reciprocal exchange of information in a process referred to as mutual alignment. Statistical methods for characterizing alignment between two interacting partners are emerging. In general, they exploit the temporal organization of dyadic interactions to uncover the effect of one partner on the other and the extent to which partners are aligned. This paper describes and provides a tutorial on one such method, categorical cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), which quantifies the temporal structure and co-visitation of individual and sequential states of interest. CRQA is a useful descriptive technique that can be used to explore the extent, structures, and patterns of partner alignment within dyadic interactions. We provide a brief technical introduction to CRQA and a tutorial on its application to understanding parent-child linguistic interactions using the ‘crqa’ package in R (Coco, Monster, Leonardi, Dale, & Wallot, 2021). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Social interactions, particularly parent-child conversations, play a critical role in children’s early learning and pre-academic skill development. While these interactions are bidirectional, complex, and dynamic, much of the research in this area tends to separate speakers’ talk and capture the frequency of words or utterances. Beyond the aggregation of talk exists rich information about conversational structures and processes, such as the extent to which speakers are aligned or reciprocate each other’s talk. These measures can be derived using categorical cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA), a method that quantifies the temporal structure and co-visitation of individual and sequential events, e.g., utterances between speakers. In this paper, we present an application of CRQA, following the protocol described in our tutorial paper (Duong et al., 2024, this issue), to describe alignment in parent-child conversations about numbers and math (i.e., number talk). We used the ‘crqa’ package in R and the code used in this application is available in the Supplemental Materials. Further, the CRQA measures derived from this application were compared to traditional frequency measures of talk, i.e., counts of utterances, in the prediction of children’s math skills. Overall, we showed that (1) CRQA can be applied to existing transcription data to uncover theoretically-driven patterns of parent-child talk that are not captured by common frequency measures and (2) these CRQA measures offer additional, rich information about interactions beyond frequencies of talk and can be used to predict individual differences in children’s math skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

A growing body of research has examined parents' practices to support their young children's number learning at home, that is, the home numeracy environment. Many of these studies focus on formal and informal domains of numeracy activities, which are inconsistently defined and related to children's math learning. In this study, we explore dimensions of the home numeracy environment and examine their relations with children's math skills among a sample of 4-year-old children and their parents over the course of 1 year. Parents reported on the frequency of 21 numeracy activities when children were 4 and 5. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a 2-factors solution: number-related play activities and use of educational materials with numbers. Frequency of play with numbers was positively related to children's ability to solve applied math problems at age 5, controlling for prior number skills, child age, and socioeconomic status. In contrast, neither measure of the home numeracy environment predicted symbolic number knowledge or non-symbolic number sense when controlling for covariates. These findings underscore the need to differentiate between factors of the home numeracy environment and to develop clear theoretical definitions of these factors.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.