Six- to 9-year olds predicted the movement of a balance beam. Results indicated that children who received feedback improved their performance more than those who did not receive feedback; the presence of a partner was beneficial only when children did not receive feedback; and children whose partner exhibited higher-level reasoning benefitted…

Observed 20-month olds' solitary play and collaborative play with their mothers. Found that child language and mothers' symbolic play influenced child collaborative play; child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence predicted child solitary play and influenced mothers' play; and mothers' physical affection influenced mothers' play. (BC)

Administered three false belief tests to preschoolers. Found that the factors that accounted for most of the variance in children's performance on the tests were the number of adult kin available to the child, child's age, number of a child's older siblings, and number of older children the child interacted with daily. (BC)

Three-year olds participated in a deceptive action as part of another person's false-belief test. Found that children who had strategically planned a deception were better at answering questions about another's false beliefs than children who had merely watched the deceptive action. This effect was not found when children performed the same action…

Three-year olds who failed a false-belief pretest were trained in two groups on either the concept of belief or the concepts of desire and perception. Both groups showed improved performance on a false-belief posttest compared to a control group trained on number conservation. Results were interpreted as demonstrating coherence in children's…

Studied preschoolers' and first through third graders' judgments about forgetting. Found that children believed central events of a story would be retained better than peripheral details; preschoolers and first graders believed memory was invulnerable to suggestion; and older children believed suggestibility and interference were less likely over…

Asked children and adults to recall events from "Sesame Street." Found that subjects' memory was influenced by causal factors (number of causal relations to other events, place in the story's causal chain) and this influence increased with age; children recalled actions, whereas adults recalled protagonists' goals; and children's recall increased…

Children were exposed to an event and asked several days later to recall the event. Results showed that children's recall was more complete and accurate when the event was experienced instead of observed or heard about; and children's sensitivity to event structure was dependent on information source (experience, observation, story) and number of…

Three- through 13-year olds were interviewed a few days after a hospital stay for traumatic injury, and again six months later. Children provided considerable information about the injury and hospital stay and made few commission errors; children's distress at the time of injury did not affect their recall of the event, but distress during the…

Five- through 9-year olds and adults heard ironic and literal criticisms and literal compliments. Found that comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years; and ratings of humor in irony increased with age but ratings of meanness in irony did not. (BC)

Children and adults made truth-value judgments on matches between pictures and sentences with pronouns and possible antecedents. Results revealed the role of dependence on grammatical structure in pronoun interpretation for all ages; a significant effect of pronoun directionality (position relative to antecedent); and adults' bias related to…

Children at 34 months of age were asked to point to a "Sesame Street" character performing an action in sets of four drawings. With familiar words and actions, children made correct choices 97% of the time. With novel action words, children performed at levels mostly above chance. (BC)

Three- to 5-year olds heard two novel labels each applied to the same novel object. About half the children accepted both labels, thereby overriding mutual exclusivity. About half the children honored mutual exclusivity by accepting only one of the labels. (BC)

While investigating a novel toy, infants heard a novel label applied to the toy by a speaker seated within the infant's view and attending to the toy (coupled condition) or by a speaker outside the infant's view (decoupled condition). Found that infants registered a link between the label and toy in the coupled but not the decoupled condition. (BC)

Assessed children's and mothers' speech at the times of children's first word and first vocabulary spurt. Found that infants were more likely to talk before than after their mother spoke and that about one-third of infants' speech occurred in response to mothers' speech. Results support a model of language development in which the child's role is…