Attempts to identify the point at which prelinguistic vocalizations are used by infants as a means of communication. A significant relationship between Piagetian causal developmental level and the occurrence of intentional vocalizations was found in a study of 46 infants with a mean age of 10.7 months. (JMB)

Assesses television influences on infants six months of age at home. Sound only, picture only, sound plus picture, or a control stimulus of unpatterned sound plus picture conditions were designed. Findings demonstrate that infants attend to the naturalistic presentation of television stimulation and respond differentially to its visual and…

Kindergarten, third-grade and fifth-grade children were tested on a same-different auditory discrimination task. Word pairs varied in familiarity as well as summed positional frequency of the letters of the words in each pair. Results support the hypothesis that prereaders with normal language experiences develop sensitivities to…

Referential communication accuracy of mother and child pairs when the children were four years old predicted children's cognitive development one and two years later in the United States and Japan. Main effects were found to be significant even when mother IQ, SES, and child ability at age four were partialled out of the analysis. (JMB)

Investigates differences among children in relative reliance on spelling-sound rules v word-specific associations in reading words. The tendency to rely on rules is correlated with ability to read regular words. Findings indicate that analogies and smaller-unit rules are used in the reading tasks. (JMB)

Investigates the influence of logical skills (inclusion and seriation) on the degree and kind of semantic integration performed on remembered material among 47 third- and fourth-grade boys and girls and college students. (JMB)

Assesses comprehension of the mental verbs "remember" and "forget" among three-, four-, five-, and seven-year-old children by having the child judge whether or not toy characters in different situations remembered or forgot. (Author/RH)

Indicates that preschool-aged children can and do rely on temporal ordering as a cue in making a causal judgment about a simple, mechanical event. (Author/RH)

Investigates increased use of metacognition (i.e., monitoring comprehension, developing expectations, learning information sampling strategies) as reading ability develops among sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade pupils and high school students. (Author/RH)

Tests Piaget's interpretation of long-term memory improvement among 82 five- and six-year-old children. Concludes that there is little evidence for long-term memory improvement or for Piaget's theory of memory. (Author/RH)

Investigates inferential behavior in five- and six-year-old children who made inferences about the spatial locations of models of animals and people in three experiments. Two levels of inference were found. Inferences of most five year olds were consistent with information given; Inferences of most six year olds were logically necessary ones.…

Investigates performance of 8, 10, 12 year olds and adults on cognitive tasks in terms of several processing-speed measures, each of which may change independently with age. Results underscore the complexity of developmental change in processing efficiency. (Author/RH)

Reports three experiments based on the hypothesis that qualitative changes in verbal reasoning emerge, not from the conclusions children draw, but from what they accept as conclusive evidence. Results show a gradual development across 7-13 age range in ability to distinguish logically certain from only suggested or probabilistic conclusions.…

Assesses the long-term retention of conditioned operant footkicks by three-month-old infants. Views a conditioning analysis as a logical means by which to bridge the gap between animal and adult human models of memory. (Author/RH)

The results of two experiments showed that five year olds can learn to solve class-inclusion problems if they are forced to consider the contradiction between their incorrect answers and their correct counting of the superordinate and subordinate classes. (JMB)