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There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of research studies employing event-related potential (ERP) techniques to examine dynamic and rapidly occurring neural processes with children during the preschool and early childhood years. Despite this, there has been relatively little discussion of the methodological and procedural differences that exist for studies of young children versus older children and adults. That is, reviewers, editors, and consumers of this work often expect developmental studies to simply apply adult techniques and procedures to younger samples. Procedurally, this creates unrealistic expectations for research paradigms, data collection, and data reduction and analyses. Scientifically, this leads to inappropriate measures and methods that hinder drawing conclusions and advancing theory. Based on ERP work with preschoolers and young children from 10 laboratories across …