Investigates the effects of implicit linguistic information on the conversational responses of preschool children. Following a conversation in which the experimenter's remarks were intended to implicitly focus a child's attention on either an action or an object portrayed in a picture, subjects were asked to describe the picture. (JMB)

Using an open-ended questionnaire, 236 fifth- and sixth-grade pupils attributed their success or failure on a test given in their classroom to eight different causes. Results indicated that the pupils tended to attribute success mainly to external causes and failure mainly to internal causes. (JMB)

The contraceptive effectiveness of 155 single women between 15 and 25 years of age was found to be significantly and negatively related to a means-end problem-solving ability and a belief in internal control and significantly and positively related to a belief in chance control. (JMB)

Results showed that while preschool children's self-control was less effective in waiting conditions when rewards were available for attention, presence of rewards facilitated self-control in the working conditions. (JMB)

Results of two experiments suggest that the initial head-turning preference of an infant is related to the holding preference of its mother. (JMB)

Constructs a model for understanding possible relationships between parents' personal social networks and their children's development. (JMB)

Explores the hypothesis that representation, as measured by object permanence attainment, is the main prerequisite for language acquisition. Differing definitions of representation, differing assumptions about cognitive stages, and differing criteria for assessing cognitive abilities such as object permanence may account for some of the divergent…

Results showed that concentrations of testosterone were significantly greater in the umbilical blood of newborn males than females. In both sexes, firstborns had significantly more progesterone and estrogens than later borns, and among males, firstborns had higher concentrations of testosterone. Temporal spacing of childbirths had greater effects…

Results of three studies suggest that, to notice inconsistencies in prose, children have to encode and store information, draw relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain inferred propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out. (JMB)

Inference tasks emphasizing the acceptance of lack of closure (ALC), memory, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning were administered to 67 males and 74 females ranging in age from 5 to 12 years. Results suggest that the relationship of ALC to age is mediated by memory development rather than by logical development. (JMB)

Two cognitive tasks of physical uncertainty were used to assign 56 subjects (aged 5 to 17 years) to one of three cognitive stages. Two tests for comprehension of speaker uncertainty were then administered to all participants. Results were interpreted as showing that development of cognitive stages is structurally related to comprehension of speech…

First graders were taught to read words either in printed sentence contexts or printed singly on flash cards. Post-test scores indicated that context-trained children learned more about the semantic identities of printed words, while flash card-trained children could read the words faster and learned more about orthographic forms. (JMB)

Fifth-grade children's interests were assessed and two weeks later each child received a set of encyclopedia passages in cloze format. Half of these passages corresponded to the child's most preferred topics and half to the child's least preferred topics. Results indicated that both Black and White children comprehended more of their high- than…

Preschool children's ability to infer an object's position in a room from information contained on a map was assessed under five conditions: (1) map aligned inside the room; (2) map aligned outside the room; (3) map rotated 180 degrees inside the room; (4) map rotated 180 degrees outside the room; and (5) map held vertically outside the room. (JMB)