A group of 40 preschool children, ranging in age from three to five years, were required to illustrate the meaning of reversible passive sentences in which noun animacy was systematically varied. (Author/JMB)

Investigated the effectiveness of a training procedure corresponding to a component analysis of a hypothesis-testing task in improving kindergarten children's problem-solving abilities. (Author/JMB)

Early and late first-grade children, third-grade poor and good readers, and adults named pictures under several interference conditions: with embedded intracategory or extracategory words, pronounceable or nonpronounceable letter strings, and visual noise. (Author/JMB)

Fourth and sixth graders and adults read words preceded by either a congruous, incongruous, or no-sentence context, and then completed another task where they named the color of the target word. Results suggested that context effects are mediated by automatic processes which decrease in importance with age and reading ability. (Author/JMB)

Sixty kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade children were required to construct numerically equivalent collections and to determine asymmetric-transitive relations among nonequivalent collections, using two strategies of cardinal number: correspondence and counting. A novel "collinear correspondence" task was also introduced and compared…

Children ranging in age from 4 to 6 years and adults were asked to judge each of a series of videotaped actions as being intentional or unintentional. The series included voluntary acts with both intended and unintended effects, involuntary acts and "object-like" movements. (Author/JMB)

Tested two competing hypotheses explaining infants' failure to search for an object in a new hiding place: (1) that the concept of object is not yet differentiated from the concept of place, and (2) that difficulties in spatial localization are responsible for the search failure. (Author/JMB)

Results of two experiments suggested (1) that spatial cues serve as functional stimuli in the standard probe-type task, and (2) that the contextual uniqueness of the first item is probably responsible for the occurrence of primacy in young children. (Author/JMB)

A group of 108 children from nursery school, first grade, and third grade were given five problems measuring the concept of time, in which they were required to judge and explain which of two partially overlapping events started first, which ended first, and which lasted for a longer time. (Author/JMB)

Sixteen fifth graders and 16 ninth graders representing combinations of high and low SES delivered a persuasive message to each of four hypothetical target listeners. Deriving in part from Bernstein's developmental sociolinguistic theory, messages were analyzed into five major categories of appeal. (Author/JMB)

Examined the extent to which mothers synchronize their verbal references to objects with other, nonverbal events when addressing children in the first two years of life. Forty-two mothers and their infants (age 11, 14, and 24 months) were observed in a joint play situation involving a number of toys. (Author/JMB)

Selected cognitive developments presumed to mediate the development of achievement motivation are described. Age trends for four causal schemes involving the concepts of effort and ability from 5 to 13 years of age are presented. Developments related to ability, task difficulty, and incentive value are also described. (Author/JMB)