{"pk":29399,"title":"The latent factor structure of developmental change in early childhood","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Piaget proposed that development proceeded in stages; morerecently researchers have proposed modular theories in whichdifferent abilities develop on their own timetable. Despite theabundance of theory, there is little empirical work on the struc-ture of developmental changes in early childhood. We inves-tigate this question using a large dataset of parent-reporteddevelopmental milestones. We compare a variety of factor-analytic item response theory models and find that variationin development from birth to 55 months of age is best de-scribed by a model with three distinct dimensions. We alsofind evidence that dimensionality increases across age, withthe youngest children described by a two-factor model. Theseresults provide a model-based method for linking holistic de-scriptions of early development to basic theoretical questionsabout the nature of change in childhood.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"child development; milestones; item response the-ory; model comparison"}],"section":"Facets of Cognition","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1j4225wf","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Benjamin","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Stenhaug","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29399/galley/19259/download/"}]}