Day care has a significant effect on children's conceptions of social rules that is not related to egocentrism or a lack of stimulus familiarity. Moral transgressions were regarded as equally serious by veterans and newly enrolled, while the distinction between morality and convention was unclear for the newly enrolled. (RH))

Investigates whether third- and fourth-grade children respond differently to conflict with friends and acquaintances. Results support the view that conflict between friends promotes more social development than conflict between nonfriends. Discussion among friends disagreeing on answers to social problems resulted in more mature solutions than…

Describes a new 48-item self-report instrument, the Multidimensional Measure of Children's Perceptions of Control, which defines children's perceptions of control as understanding the locus of sufficient cause for success and failure. Three dimensions of third- through ninth-grade children's perceptions of control are assessed within three…

Five common play criteria were applied by subjects to a videotape of nursery school children's behavior, rated separately for occurrence of play. The idea that play is best predicted by a combination of criteria was supported by the finding that, when more criteria occurred simultaneously, the more certainly a judgment of play was implied.…

Among a group of 103 children with a mean age of eight years, full-scale IQ correlation was significantly higher for monozygotic than dizygotic pairs. Monozygotic pairs also showed significantly greater concordance for subtest profile than dizygotic pairs. The usefulness of profile analysis is examined, and directions for future research are…

Epstein (1974) claims evidence for regular two-year growth spurts in the development of brain and mind, a phenomenon he calls phrenoblysis. Unfortunately, repeated analysis of the data he presents as proof of his theory provides no support. (Author/RH)

A total of 400 subjects differing in age, sex, and SES were tested on strategic, relational, experimental, and postformal abilities. Results showed that Demetriou and Efklides' model of the development of formal thought could be integrated with theories claiming that thought is structured in different inquiring systems and develops postformally as…

The logs of two ships transporting juvenile convicts from Great Britain to Australia in the early nineteenth century have been transcribed. Data on the backgrounds of the boys and height data are presented and analyzed. Comparisons are made with ninteenth- and twentieth-century data sets. (Author/RH)

Discusses issues making developmental studies of forgetting difficult to interpret: (1) stages-of-learning confounds, (2) failure to separate forgetting from performance factors operating on retention tests, and (3) failure to disentangle contributions of storage-based and retrieval-based forgetting to retention test performance. A paradigm and…

A stages-of-learning model was used to examine effects of picture-word manipulation on storage and retrieval differences between disabled and nondisabled grade 2 and 6 children. Results showed that disabled students are poorer at memory tasks and in developing the ability to reliably retrieve information than nondisabled children. (Author/RH)

Investigates several variables' effects on children's inferential processes, including cause of target event, presence and timing of questions prior to recall, and inference type that the questions demanded. Children four and seven differed in logical, constrained, and unconstrained inference production; causal connections between story events…

While six- and nine-year-olds were as good as adults in distinguishing what they did from what they saw someone else do, children had particular trouble across a range of actions in distinguishing actual from imagined doing. All subjects recalled actions according to performer; organization by person categories reduced clustering based on action…

Metaphors were embedded at Reaction or Outcome positions in a story grammar structural form. Recall of metaphors and literal statements with comparable meanings was equal among seven-, nine-, and 11-year-olds. Recall was better if statements were in the Outcome position, but metaphors were comprehended equally well in both positions and had no…

Findings suggest that semantic knowledge for concrete objects is represented and organized in similar ways in autistic, retarded, and normal children. Previous findings on cognitive deficits in autistic children are more likely related to their inability to use cognitive representations in an appropriate and flexible manner. (Author/RH)

When not socially engaged, children showed a significantly greater percentage of reoriented attention during vocalizing than nonvocalizing periods. Findings confirm the existence of an attention/vocalization relation and are consonant with Greenfield's predictions about the nature of this relation. The relation held equally for prelinguistic and…