Examines the ability to differentiate appearance-reality and Level Two perspective-taking in tactile modality among a total of 92 children aged two-four years in three studies. The results indicate that three-year-olds find tactile appearance-reality and Level Two perspective-taking tasks easier than visual ones. (RJC)

Studied the way in which 32 preschoolers aged three-five years, 28 second-graders and 64 undergraduates generalized from a labeled exemplar to other potential members of the same category. Results indicated that preschoolers focused mostly on single attributes in making category decisions and older individuals primarily exhibited multiple…

Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be erroneous than productions of…

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Studies the relationship between timing of puberty and spatial ability in 53 undergraduate women. Results do not show evidence for greater spatial ability on the part of those who have late maturation. (RJC)

Examines young children's preferences and understanding regarding external and internal causes of behavior. Considers research in four areas: (1) knowledge of psychological states; (2) understanding that psychological states can cause behavior; (3) preference for internal versus external causes; and (4) discounting. (RJC)

Investigates the ability of 757 children aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 years to judge the importance of intraepisodic and interepisodic story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Children in all groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as being more important than statements with few such relations. (RJC)

Investigated children's causal-explanatory conceptions of the workings of a labeling strategy. The 72 children of four-six years showed two types of conceptions, both of which increased with age. (RJC)

Studied the verbal-nonverbal consistency principle to infer truth and lying in two experiments which involved 117 children in kindergarten, second, and fourth grade. Findings in both experiments indicated that the use of the verbal-nonverbal consistency principle increased with age. (RJC)

A total of 184 students aged 6-29 were interviewed to determine their conceptions of fairness in school learning. Findings indicated that: (1) students perceived peer tutoring to be the fairest practice at all grades; (2) older students adopted a more individualistic, less communal orientation toward learning. (RJC)

Forty-two families with children in transition to early and mid-adolescence were interviewed in a follow-up study of parent-child agreement in beliefs concerning the child, and of children's awareness of parental beliefs. Results indicate increases in accuracy of prediction of parental beliefs by children between the ages of 10 and 13. (RJC)

Emotional autonomy was examined in three studies of adolescents and young adults. Subjects of the studies were 148 seventh graders, 213 high school students, and 104 undergraduates, respectively. Discussion concerns the conceptualization of attachment versus detachment, dependence, and autonomy in theories of adolescence. (RJC)

Studied the ages at which 240 children in grades one to five read and transformed times given in analog and digital displays, linked times to activities, and judged the order of hours in the day. Findings indicated that digital time reading was well developed by the first grade. (RJC)

Investigated the interpretation of the word "big" by 40 children of 3 to 5 years. The type and orientation of objects used in the study were varied. Results demonstrated that contextual factors influenced children's responses. (RJC)

Investigated the way in which forty 10- to 20-month-old infants established an initial mapping between objects and their labels. Results indicated that language could increase infants' attention to objects beyond the time that labeling actually occurred. (RJC)