Describes the ideas proposed by James Mark Baldwin which anticipated much of Jean Piaget's work. The goals, genetic approach, and epistemological assumptions underlying Piaget's inquiry into cognitive development found explicit statement in Baldwin's work. Discusses Baldwin's current importance for psychology. (Author/CB)

Studies predictions about letter reversals made by Goodnow's "grammar of action." Two samples of right- and left-handed children in nursery school through first grade printed from memory immediately after exposure to each of 41 reversible letters and numbers. Results challenge "grammar of action" proposals about the inappropriate applications of…

Tests the construct of belief-discrepancy reasoning (i.e., judgments people make about others who disagree with them). First, fourth, seventh, and tenth graders were assessed and retested one year later. Longitudinal trends supported a four-stage development toward open-mindedness which was confirmed by another study of fourth and seventh graders…

Investigates the sensitivity of children aged 6 to 10 to stylistic properties of line drawings. Subjects were asked to judge the similarity of 12 drawings which varied along the dimensions of clarity, expressiveness, and line thickness. In contrast to previous research, the youngest children had the ability to make multidimensional…

Examined the relationship between responsiveness to auditory novelty in full-term and preterm infants and subsequent intellectual performance at five years of age. Results suggest that measures of early perceptual-memory development may reflect early cognitive processes necessary for later intellectual performance. (Author/RH)

Investigates the antecedents of individual differences in cognitive/language competence for 121 24-month-olds who were also assessed at 6 and 13 months. Warm verbal interactions between mother and child at three ages were associated with child competence at 24 months. Socioeconomic status was also modestly correlated. (Author/CB)

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

Examines modification of mother-child instruction as a function of age of learner in middle childhood (six versus eight years). Instruction and learning were compared on two tasks designed to simulate school and home activities. Results show more intense instruction of all kinds for the younger children in the school task. (RH)

Compares performance of 172 children aged 7 to 13 years on tasks involving visual or auditory presentation of rhyming and nonrhyming letters and an oral or written response. Results indicate insensitivity to phonological similarity for young children with disabilities; sensitivity improves with age, but deficits in short-term memory remain at…

Tests second- and sixth-grade students' incidental memory for words under acoustic- and semantic-processing conditions. The findings were predicted by an associative-processing account of incidental memory previously advanced by Ghatala (1981) and indicate that both knowledge-base development and processing activity determine children's incidental…

Examines the relationship between preschool children's (n = 96) cognitive processing of video (V) and audio (A) information on television under four conditions: A/V match, A/V mismatch, V alone, and A alone. Results suggest that in regular television programs the video material simply appears to be more salient and more memorable than the audio…

Tests the universality hypothesis of language acquisition by asking young monolingual English and Japanese children to verify true affirmatives, false affirmatives, false negatives, and true negatives. The hypothesis was not supported in the case of Japanese-speaking children. A theory of cross-linguistic language acquisition is proposed.…

Examines the conditions under which children and adults use indexical words to refer to objects or to corefer with nouns in discourse. Subjects at three ages (6, 10, and adult) performed simple tasks and described their actions. (Author/AS)

Attempts to isolate lexical access latencies by measuring word-naming times in two conditions: (1) words were preidentified and had only to be pronounced on signal; (2) words had to be both identified and pronounced. Results strengthen the conclusion that vocal programing is exempt from the age declines seen in other sensory-motor tracts.…

Hypothesizes that the amount of verbal interaction with caregivers would be a salient index of center quality, in that it would be a particularly important determinant of language skill. Three sets of measures were used to assess quality of the day care environment: children's language development, family background, and home…