Parents are increasingly expected to supplement their children's school-based learning by providing support for children's homework. However, parents' capacities to provide such support may vary and may be limited by the experience of depression. This may have implications for child development. In the course of a prospective, longitudinal study…

Theory of mind (ToM) was examined in late-signing deaf children in two studies by using standard tests and measures of spontaneous talk about inner states of perception, affect and cognition during storytelling. In Study 1, there were 21 deaf children aged 6 to 11 years and 13 typical-hearing children matched with the deaf by chronological age. In…

Children's use of internal-state language during 2 tasks (book narration and describing a best friend) was investigated in a sample (N=38) of 7- to 9-year-olds. Proportional use of internal-state talk on the two tasks was highly positively correlated, a relation that was independent of verbosity, age, verbal ability and the use of…

One class of parent-child interaction that has recently received attention is a mother's engagement with her child at a mental level. The current study operationalizes this notion by asking the mothers of 354 7- to 11-year-old children drawn from a larger community sample (N=659) to guess the responses of their children, who, in turn, were asked…

Alleged victims of child abuse are often the only sources of information about the crimes, and this places them in the role of experts when conversing about their experiences. Despite developmental deficiencies in memory, cognition, communication skills, and social style, researchers have shown that children's informativeness in such conversations…

In this paper, we extend our social-cultural developmental model of autobiographical memory development (Nelson & Fivush, 2004) to discuss children's developing understanding of self and other as temporally extended in time. Parent-guided reminiscing about past events that includes discussion, comparison, and negotiation of internal states of self…

Assessments of lexical acquisition are often limited to preschool children on forced-choice comprehension measures. This study assessed the nature of the understandings 30 school-age children (mean age = 6;7) acquired about the science term eclipse following a naturalistic exposure to a solar eclipse. The knowledge children acquired about eclipses…

This study aimed to extend earlier work (Wilding, Munir, & Cornish, 2001; Wilding, 2003) which showed that children (aged 6-15) who were rated by their teachers as having poor attentional ability made more errors on a visual search task than children rated as having good attentional ability. The present study used a simpler version of the search…

It is often of theoretical interest to know if implicit memory (repetition priming) develops across childhood under a given circumstance. Methodologically, however, it is difficult to determine whether development is present when baseline performance for unstudied items improves with age. Calculation of priming in absolute…

The present work investigated the development of an explicit understanding of pretend play actions. Study 1 revealed a long decalage between earlier implicit understanding of pretence as an intentional activity and a later more explicit understanding. Study 2 was a training study. It tested for two factors--systematic pretence experience and…

The two experiments reported here investigated the ability of sighted children and children with visual impairment to comprehend text and, in particular, to draw inferences both while reading and while listening. Children were assigned into "comprehension skill" groups, depending on the degree to which their reading comprehension skill was in line…

Investigation of children's understanding of the earth can reveal much about the origins and development of scientific knowledge. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) claim that children construct coherent, theory-like mental models of the earth. However, more recent research has indicated that children's knowledge of the earth is fragmented and…

In adults, visual search for a colour target is facilitated if the target and distractors fall in different colour categories (e.g. Daoutis, Pilling, & Davies, in press). The present study explored category effects in children's colour search. The relationship between linguistic colour categories and perceptual categories was addressed by…

The relation between theory of mind and affective perspective taking was examined in a study with 42 three- to five-year-olds. Children completed tasks measuring affective perspective taking, theory of mind, and receptive language abilities. Significant positive correlations existed between overall affective perspective taking and theory of mind…

The study investigated at what age children draw boundaries around pairs of objects that share either similarity or proximity. In two studies (N=132 and N=252) using a Wertheimer array, a clear age trend between 4 and 8 years showed that while young children were more likely to code objects into individual regions, older children were more likely…