Two experiments were conducted to examine behaviors that characterize play with convergent and divergent materials and the effects of play on convergent and divergent problem solving among 64 3- and 4-year-olds. (Author/RH)

Kindergartners and second graders evaluated the communicative clarity of brief oral instructions under three conditions: unambiguous, no closure, and closure. Results suggest that the growth of children's knowledge about communication includes the developing awareness that an ambiguous message is intrinsically unclear and remains a poor message…

Third- and fifth-grade children's abilities to make inferences in the context of reading and understanding a lengthy story were examined. The most critical result was that the younger, but not the older children, made fewer inferences when the component premises for an inference were located in separate paragraphs than when they occurred in the…

Hypothesizes that young children respond incorrectly in interpreting ambiguous communications in referential tasks because they respond to the elocutionary performative force rather than the locutionary content of the communications. Results of two experiments tended to confirm the hypothesis. (Author/RH)

Examined effects of cooperation on role taking and moral reasoning in 120 fifth-grade students. Classrooms using cooperative peer-initiated group learning were compared with other innovative and more traditional teacher-centered methods. Role taking was found to be enhanced by cooperative interdependence, but moral reasoning level was not…

Critically evaluates in terms of predictive and concurrent validity a widely used method of identifying children at risk in peer relations. This method emphasizes children's total rate of peer interaction, regardless of the quality or skillfulness of the interaction. Recommendations are given for future research in this area. (Author/DB)

Stable characteristics of female rhesus monkeys with offspring, in terms of Confident and Excitable scores, were significantly positively correlated with the respective scores of their female offspring but not their male offspring. Female parents' Excitable scores were significantly negatively correlated with males' Confident scores. How this…

Investigated through direct observation in the home whether mothers socialize differently boys and girls growing up as opposite-sexed twins, triplets, and quadruplets as a function of their different genders. Children and mothers were rated on behaviors about which contradictory evidence had been reported in the literature. (Author/DB)

Individual differences in the social behavior of young siblings were studied in 40 sibling pairs observed at home, when the second child was 8 months old and 14 months old. Differences between same-sex and different-sex sibling pairs were marked by the second observation. More positive social behavior characterized same-sex pairs; more negative…

Responses of 1- to 2 1/2-year-old children as bystanders to naturally occurring and simulated expressions of anger and affection by others were recorded by mothers trained as observers. Expressions of anger frequently caused distress in the children. Distress responses were significantly more likely when physical attack occurred. Overt signs of…

Type A and Type B children's efforts to achieve were investigated. Type A's solved more arithmetic problems than did Type B's in a no-deadline condition. Type A's held a weight, which matched individual hand strength, 50 percent longer than did Type B's. Ambiguous performance criteria seemed to increase Type A efforts to excel. (Author/DB)

Examined the relationship between sex role identity and two measures of adjustment--self-acceptance and peer acceptance--among adolescents. Sex differences were discovered regarding factors positively associated with self-acceptance. Findings suggest that a model of sex role differentiation during adolescence must recognize differential pressures…

Preferential looking at stimuli varying in temporal frequency was examined in 11 prematurely born infants. The relationship between amount of looking and stimulus frequency yielded a significant linear trend with the fastest frequency used (4 hertz) being most preferred. (Author/DB)

Eleven infants with Down's syndrome and 10 of 11 nonhandicapped infants operated an automatic device which enabled them to choose to listen to nursery rhymes sung or played on musical instruments. Both groups preferred the singing, and the Down's Syndrome infants had much longer response durations for the more complex auditory stimuli. (Author/DB)

Two experiments were conducted to investigate six-month-old infants' recognition memory for the shape of an object following unimodal (visual) and bimodal (visual and haptic) familiarization. Visual recognition memory was evident only when the conditions of familiarization and testing were identical. Two possible explanations are presented and…