Social interactions regarding moral and conventional transgressions were observed among two toddler groups. Each of 16 day care center classrooms, eight serving 13- to 27-month-olds and eight serving 18- to 40-month-olds, was observed for three 45-minute sessions. Implications of results concerned the developmental origins of distinctions between…

Preschool children's evaluation and integration of visual and auditory information in speech perception was compared with that of adults. Results were used to test current views of the development of perceptual categorization and speech perception. (Author/RH)

Students in grades two, four, six, and college sorted abstract visual patterns that varied both in amount of contour and in type of visual organization (unstructured, simple symmetries, multiple symmetries, and rotational). Results suggested that children attend to both amount of contour and visual organization, but that attention to visual…

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

Proposes that young children employ two ordered, nonverbal classification strategies to interpret vague referential instructions: first, they rely on context; then, if the first strategy fails, they guess. If the guess goes uncorrected, they conclude that it was correct. Two studies provide evidence supporting children's use of the hypothesized…

Results of two studies suggested that acquisition of route mapping during the preschool years provides a means of organizing spatial information and internal representations necessary for successful problem solving in general. (Author/RH)

Two experiments investigated young children's ability to use the spatial context in which objects are encountered to aid later recall of the objects themselves. Results indicated that, at least in meaningful situations, the ability to use the spatial context of items to facilitate item recall is present from a very early age. (Author/RH)

Focuses on differences occurring with age and reading skill in the use of phonemic codes in short-term retention tasks where stimuli were presented visually. Subjects were groups of average readers in grades two, four, and six; superior readers in grade four; and disabled readers in grades four and six from three public schools. (Author/RH)

Assesses the effect of same and different recognition experience intervening between acquisition and retrieval on cued recall for episodic information. Second and fourth graders and college adults were shown cue-target word pairs at acquisition and the cues alone at retrieval. In general, results showed that same experience facilitated memory for…

Two word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. Three aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word frequency effects, and phonological recoding. (Author/RH)

Tests the hypothesis that high-SES children process information more efficiently using mechanisms associated with the left hemisphere and that low-SES children process more efficiently using the right. A laterality task was administered tachistoscopically to 120 children, divided evenly by SES (high and low), sex, and grade (fifth and seventh).…

Investigated whether directing mothers to make weekly appointments to visit the neonatal intensive care unit would generalize to increase the frequency of independent maternal visiation and affect maternal perceptions of the infant and infants' length of hospitalization. (Author/RH)

Classifications of the quality of infant-mother and infant-father attachments were made for 59 children at 12 and 20 months of age using the Ainsworth strange situation paradigm. Stability of attachments from 12 to 20 months was examined in four groups defined by maternal employment status. (Author/RH)

Longitudinally examines the stability of the association between maternal behavior and preschool children's cognitive abilities. Outcome measures included both school readiness (assessed at ages five and six) and achievement on mathematics and vocabulary subtests of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills at grade six. (Author/RH)

Data from an early intervention program for children at risk for developmental retardation were used to investigate two kinds of intellectual plasticity: developmental functions and individual differences. Possible convergences between the two realms of development are examined. (Author/RH)