Investigates the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning in four-, seven-, and 11- year-old children and college freshmen. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, except on stories containing intentional injury to a person, whereas older children utilized intention.…

Investigates the development of awareness of conversational principles in preschool, first-, and third-grade children by presenting them with short stories ending with a verbal statement by a story character. Results suggest that children's understanding of conversational principles improves considerably between preschool and first grade.…

Varied conditions under which children aged four to five years matched the area of a rectangle with a given width or height to that of a square. Subjects matched one dimension of the rectangle to one side of the square suggesting that area matches seemed to be based on a side-matching strategy. (Author/AS)

Pointing gestures of verbally advanced two-year-olds were contrasted with those of less advanced peers to examine the relationships of gesture to language during the acquisition of each. Formal and functional aspects of each communicative skill were measured. Gesture and language corresponded only in their functional aspects. (Author/AS)

Ten- to thirteen-year-old children selected either the objectively more effective keyword method or the naturalistic context method for learning vocabulary meanings. Concludes that, even in the absence of explicit performance feedback, children can be induced to reflect on their use of strategies and their outcomes on subsequent cognitive actions.…

Examines modality differences in preschoolers' ability to recognize or recall temporally related events and extends Ward and Wackman's model by evaluating whether the assumed "visual viewing style" applies to preschoolers' processing of temporal relations. Results demonstrated that temporally related events were remembered more frequently when…

Studies five-year-olds' relative number judgements of small and large number displays with and without perceptual aids. Children were found to respond to local rather than global density differences and to benefit from the provision of perceptual aids on both small and large number displays. (Author/AS)

Examines development of processing speed in three backward masking studies, where presentation of second stimulus figure (mask) within a critical time interval from arrival of first figure (target) interrupts processing of first. Results indicate that processing time increases until early adolescence; changes are less marked after 13 years of age.…

Investigated children's use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes in oral reading of connected prose as a function of grade level and decoding skill. Found no overall contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy; however, less skilled decoders were helped by context in decoding some content words.…

First, fourth, seventh, and tenth graders were timed when solving simple and complex addition problems, then were presented similar problems in untimed interviews. Manipulation of confusion between addition and multiplication, where multiplication answers were given to addition problems (3 + 4 = 12) indicated an interrelatedness of these…

Explores in three experiments development of three linguistic aspects of "more" in children's speech. Experiment 1 examined nature of early semantic content of "more;" Experiment 2, the child's differentiation of mass "more" from count "more"; and Experiment 3, the child's use of "more" as a comparative marker on adjectives. (Author/BE)

Thirty-two three-month-old infants participated in two experiments showing color videotapes of facial stimuli in a paired comparison format. Suggests that contrast in effect of eye contact availability and rather subtle stimulus motion (blinking) implies that three-month-old infants are comparatively insensitive to being the object of another's…

Investigates in five- to nine-year-old children the visuomanual sinusoidal tracking of target spot on a screen. Proportion of successful performances steadily increases with age, but adult proficiency is never attained even by those who can perform the task. (Author/BE)

Investigates 9- to 11-year-old children's skill in written spelling of simple, monosyllabic nonwords. Nonword spelling was poorer for these children than for tested adults. Results suggest that word knowledge has direct (biasing) and indirect (general word spelling knowledge) effect on performance of the spelling task. (Author/BE)

Examines hypothesis that lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information. Second- and fifth-graders and college adults were shown word triplets and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. (Author/BE)