Assessed contributions of familiarity, prior experience, and age to frequency and degree of social participation of preschoolers. Normative analysis of group differences indicated that sex, age, prior peer-group experience, and familiarity did not interact and that all of them independently affected 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers' social play.…

Chinese, Japanese, and American children at grades 1 and 5 were given a battery of 10 cognitive tasks and tests of achievement in reading and mathematics. Goals were to determine (1) possible differences in cognitive abilities and (2) the possible differential relation of scores on cognitive tasks to reading by children of the three cultures.…

Examined developmental changes in children's recognition that help is needed. Four- and 9-year-olds were shown a series of videotaped vignettes of two child actors, one of whom experienced a problem because he lacked a necessary skill or was physically unable to complete a task. (Author/BE)

Evaluated whether age differences in children's generosity result from increasing altruistic motivation or increasing susceptibility to experimenter influence strategies. A total of 282 first, third, and fifth graders voted on how to spend a gift of money under one of five instructional sets--three levels of experimenter influence, peer influence,…

Examined persuasive appeals and responses to appeals among kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade friends and acquaintances. Also evaluated social perspective-taking, friendship, and self-interest reasoning as predictors of appeals and responses. Children, paired with a friend or an acquaintance, participated in a task designed to examine sharing…

Explores questions concerning within-family environment using data from 348 families that each included 2 siblings 11 to 17 years of age. Results indicate that siblings in the same family experience different environments and that these differences are related to developmental differences between siblings. (Author/BE)

Written in response to an article (Horn, 1983) that appeared in special Developmental Behavioral Genetics section of CHILD DEVELOPMENT (Volume 54), this commentary (1) notes some issues concerning Horn's analysis and interpretation of data and (2) highlights the potential for interpretational bias in behavior genetics research. (Author/BE)

In this rebuttal to Walker and Emory's commentary (also in this issue), Horn argues that the issue of the influence of environment on the average IQ of adopted children was well discussed in his article (Volume 54 of CHILD DEVELOPMENT). (BE)

This rejoinder to McCall (Volume 56, 217-218) discusses the differences in viewpoint with respect to the relationship between models and theory, the notion of "direct" tests of propositions, and the use of measures of explained variance to evaluate model performance. (Author/BE)

Reveals that young children acquiring Mandarin Chinese differentiate subject from topic, even though Chinese is a "topic-prominent" language. Data are based on results of a standardized, elicited imitation test of 95 Chinese children in Taiwan. Subjects between 2 years, 6 months and 5 years of age responded to coordinate as well as Equi-type…

Results question the validity of Cummins's threshold hypothesis and suggest that degree of bilingualism is related to variability in cognitive measures only before a certain threshold of proficiency in the second language is attained. A cause-effect model in which degree of bilingualism appears as the causal factor affecting children's cognitive…

Addressing methodological limitations, Study One compared parent-child interactions of normal and language-delayed children; Study Two investigated whether mothers adjust the length of their utterances to the child's ability to comprehend or to produce language; Study Three probed interactional variables associated with variations in the…

Findings suggest that (1) dyslexia is more prevalent in the United States than in Italy, (2) reading disabilities are strongly associated with disorders of verbal processing in both countries (although some American dyslexics also show visual-motor deficits), and (3) there is a greater dissociation between reading comprehension and decoding in…

Third- and fifth-graders, like adults, quickly named words preceded by either an incongruous or a normal incomplete sentence. Results (1) support the assumption that context effects on children's word recognition are caused by spreading-activation and expectancy-based-attentional processes operating simultaneously and (2) indicate that word…

In three experiments involving sets containing from 2z to 19 objects, preschool children gave the last counted word as the answer to the question "How many objects are there?" The relationship between children's answering with the last counted word to a how-many question and counting accurately varied with set size. (Author/RH)