The results of three experiments showed that: (1) children from 20 to 32 months of age are able to identify basic-level, conceptual, and complementary relationships; (2) objects are responded to more effectively than pictures; and (3) both perceptual and verbal-symbolic processes are important in matching and identifying stimuli. (JMB)

Two studies sought to determine the developmental relationship between the child's use of counting as a notational symbol system to extract, compare, and reproduce numerical information and the development of number conservation. Subjects were four- to six-year-old children in Study 1 and seven- to nine-year-old learning disabled children in Study…

Infants' looking and looking-away behaviors, as well as cardiac responses to mothers' spontaneous and imitative faces and to dolls' animated and still faces, were recorded for 18 term and 19 preterm infants when they were three months old. (JMB)

Fourth-, eighth- and eleventh-grade children were exposed in groups of four to short-term conditions of high or moderate spatial density involving close physical proximity. Physiological responses were measured during this exposure, and afterwards subjects engaged in a cooperation-competition activity and provided self-reports related to their…

Second- and third-grade children receiving no consequences or only social consequences for donating to needy peers attributed their behavior to a concern for the other child. Children receiving material consequences together with social consequences tended to attribute their help giving to external sources. (JMB)

Eating rates (bites per interval) and other meal behaviors (number of chews, sips, talks with a neighbor, and chews per bite) were observed for 30 normal and 30 overweight white preschool children in their school cafeterias. The children ranged in age from 1 1/2 to 6 years. (JMB)

Groups of 20 normal and 20 hyperactive boys ranging in age from 6 to 12 years were observed interacting with their mothers in 15-minute free-play and 15-minute structured-task situations. (JMB)

Videotapes were made of 164 children aged eight or nine playing alone and playing with a parent in a toy room. Data on their parents' work histories, socialization techniques, and self report of sex roles were analyzed in relation to the children's play activities. Effects of family constellation were also investigated. (JMB)

Experiment 1 showed that four-year-old children memorized a list of non-rhyming items better than a list of rhyming ones. In Experiment 2, bilingual children learned a list of items which had rhyming names in one language and non-rhyming names in the other. Results showed better performance on the non-rhyming items. (JMB)

A sequence of interpersonal problems was administered to fourth and fifth graders who initially performed below age norms on perspective taking. The effect of this semistructured training, which actively engaged the children in developing solutions, was compared to that of a "no treatment" and to that of an activity group. (JMB)

In Experiment 1, personal sentences containing the subject's name were contrasted at two levels of syntactic complexity with impersonal sentences containing other familiar nouns. Experiment 2 was conducted to rule out focusing of attention as an alternative explanation. Results showed that personalized sentence content facilitated children's…

A structural analysis of skills taught by 49 parents to their preschool children indicated that individual characteristics affect initial prerequisite-skill performance directly and superordinate-skill learning indirectly through their impact on prerequisite skills. (JMB)

Two experiments using a measure of pure preference with second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh graders generally supported the developmental theory of reward preferences. (JMB)