Integration/differentiation of mental processes is major mechanism of development. Developmental theories ascribe intellectual development to it. In psychometric theory, Spearman's law of diminishing returns postulates that increasing g allows increasing differentiation of cognitive abilities, because increased mental power allows variable investment in domain-specific learning. Empirical evidence has been inconsistent so far, with some studies supporting and others contradicting this mechanism. This state of affairs is due to a developmental phenomenon: Both differentiation and strengthening of relations between specific processes and g may happen but these changes are phase-specific and ability-specific, depending upon the developmental priorities in the formation of g in each phase. We present eight studies covering the age span from 4 to 85 years in support of this phenomenon. Using new powerful modeling methods we showed that differentiation and binding of mental processes in g occurs in cycles. Specific processes intertwine with g at the beginning of cycles when they are integrated into it; when well established, these processes may vary with increasing g, reflecting its higher flexibility. Representational knowledge, inductive inference and awareness of it, and grasp of logical constraints framing inference are the major markers of g, first intertwining with in their respective cycles and differentiating later during the periods of 2-6, 7-11, and 11-20 years, respectively. The implications of these findings for an overarching cognitive developmental/differential theory of human mind are discussed.

We present a theory of mental architecture and development focusing on general intelligence (g). The theory integrates psychometric and developmental theories of intelligence into an overarching framework. The paper first focuses on the composition of g. It is shown that g involves attention control, flexibility, working memory, cognizance of mental processes, and inference. We then present a model of intellectual development involving four cycles - episodic, realistic representation-based, rule-based, and principle-based thought - and summarize several studies showing how the processes involved in g interact in each cycle. We then present research aiming to increase intelligence. Finally, we discuss the implications of this theory for psychometric, cognitive, and developmental science and show how it solves long-standing theoretical and practical problems not solved by other theories, such as the decreasing likelihood of attaining high intelligence, the differentiation of abilities with development, and the training fade-out problem.

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Oral language and narrative skills constitute very critical factors for children's academic performance and social competence. The aim of the present study was to investigate the developmental patterns of story retelling as well as the relationship between oral language and story retelling in preschool and primary school children. 237 Greekspeaking children (4-5, 5-6 and 6-7 years old) participated in the study. Vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness skills and pragmatics were examined through a standardized psychometric test. Story retelling was measured by inviting the children to listen to a story and then retell it. Children's narratives were evaluated according to microstructure (use of conjunctions and lexical cohesion) and macrostructure (story grammar and temporal sequencing) criteria. The results showed that older children performed better than the younger ones across all the oral language and story retelling tasks.Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) revealed that vocabulary skills stand out as a stable predictor across all the three age groups. A new finding was also demonstrated, highlighting that morphological awareness, phonological awareness skills and pragmatics work together with vocabulary skills in diverse patterns at different points of a child's development, in order to support his/her ability to retell a story.