Uses Lewin's field theory as a framework to appraise children's momentary state of curiosity and exploratory behavior. Discusses two levels of analysis: child-stimulus situation and child-stimulus-adult situation. Argues that a parent can be a barrier hindering a child's exploration, or a facilitator to remove barriers. (Author/SD)

Siblings have considerable influence on one another's development throughout childhood, yet most human development research has neglected sibling socialization. Through this volume, we aim to enhance our understanding of how siblings play formative roles in one another's social and emotional development. We examine the mechanisms by which children…

Guided by an ecological framework, we explore how siblings' and parents' roles, relationships, and activities are intertwined in everyday life, providing unique and combined contributions to development. In a departure from past research that emphasized the separate contributions of siblings and parents to individual development, we find that…

Siblings are important sources of social influence throughout childhood and adolescence. Nevertheless, the processes by which siblings influence one another remain relatively unexplored. We highlight two theories of sibling influence--sibling deidentification and social learning--that offer insights as to how and why siblings develop similar and…

Stressful life events and experiences may disrupt the typical day-to-day interactions between sisters and brothers that provide the foundation of sibling socialization. This chapter examines four experiences that may affect patterns of sibling interaction: parental marital conflict, parental divorce and remarriage, foster care placement, and a…

Sibling relationships provide one of the most stable and powerful developmental contexts for the transmission of both prosocial and antisocial behavior. As a source of support and skill development, sibling relationships can build competence in self-regulation and emotional understanding. However, sibling relationships marked by antisocial…

The study of siblings has become increasingly central to developmental science. Sibling relationships have unique effects on development, and sibling designs allow researchers to isolate causal mechanisms in development. This volume emphasizes causal mechanisms in the social domain. We review the preceding chapters in relation to six topics: a…

Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge, the conceptual understanding of…

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. We explore this claim in the semantic domain of evidentiality by considering various sets of data from Turkish-speaking children between one and a half to six years. We present evidence for (1) the…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials…

In verbal communication, the hearer takes advantage of the linguistic expressions of certainty and evidentiality to assess how committed the speaker might be to the truth of the informational content of the utterance. Little is known, however, about the precise developmental mechanism of this ability. In this chapter, we approach the question by…

Recent research suggests that acquisition of mental-state language may influence conceptual development. We examine this possibility by investigating the conceptual links between evidentiality in language and suggestibility. Young children are disproportionately suggestible and tend to change their reports or memories when questioned. The authors…

We summarize progress in the developmental study of coping, including specification of a multilevel framework, construction of definitions of coping that rely on regulation as a core concept, and identification of developmentally graded members of families of coping. We argue that these accomplishments are a prelude to the real tasks of a…

Temperament refers to individual differences in two broad aspects of behavior: (1) emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and (2) self-regulatory processes that modulate such reactivity. These individual differences are grounded in people's constitution and influence both stress reactions and patterns of coping. In this chapter, we examine…