Results suggest that, among nursery and kindergarten children, metaphoric processes exist early in development, as exemplified by a high frequency of spontaneous metaphor in the free play of young children. The content and cognitive features of these metaphors are discussed and hypotheses are offered for the decline of metaphor use with age.…

The effects of age, modeling, tuition, and sanctions on self-control of motor behavior were examined among children 6, 7, 9, and 11 years of age. Among the results, activation latency and inhibition error were influenced most by the actions of the model and the introduction of a negative sanction, and less by tuition. (Author/RH)

First-, fifth-, and eighth-grade children were asked to make bearing and distance estimates to six targets from three sighting locations in their school. Among the results, correlations between estimated and actual bearings and distances were extremely high at all grade levels. Bearing accuracy increased between first and fifth grades. (Author/RH)

A grouping task revealed a chronological progression: color and form determined the 4-year-old children's grouping about equally; form dominated in the 5-year-olds; and 9-year-olds grouped primarily by conceptual attributes. Performance on a memory task showed the developmental shift from color to form to concept, while cued recall showed…

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Results indicated that, for all but one of eight autistic children, visual discriminations were acquired significantly faster, with fewer errors, when the S+ stimulus was faded first. These findings are related to the literature on the effects of stimulus novelty on selection and learning. (Author/RH)

Ninety-seven children between 5 and 8 years of age drew two arrays, four times each, in different orientations vis-a-vis the child. Younger children's drawings contained much array-specific information but often no indication at all of the child's viewing position. Older children's drawings were predominantly view-specific, often containing little…

Sixty children aged 2-3 to 5-6 were given four quantity tasks that tested their understanding of "more" and "same." Tasks involving a manipulative response were significantly easier than those involving a yes/no judgment. (Author/RH)

Examines whether partial pictorial cues facilitate imagery in 6-year-old children and whether the facilitation of recall is due to simple repetition of contextual information or to encoding specificity. Concludes children do benefit from partial pictures. (HOD)

Describes two experiments that examined the conditions determining age changes in novelty preferences of children. (HOD)

Adjective noun-noun word triplets were presented in an acquisition encoding context to second and fourth graders and college students to determine if they were compatible with trace information in memory and change with age. (HOD)

Examines the role of experience in the use of orthographic structure by good and poor sixth-grade readers. Results showed that poor sixth-grade readers used orthographic structure to speed their matching judgments just as effectively as good sixth-grade readers. (HOD)

Describes three experiments that tested autistic children's nonverbal and verbal categorization abilities. Concludes that autistic children do not suffer a specific cognitive deficit in ability to categorize and form abstract concepts. (HOD)

Investigates the relationship between auditory and visual processing modality and strategy instruction in first- and second-grade children. Determines sentence strategy to be effective for both auditory and visual processing. (HOD)

Presents four experiments comparing the perceptual span in second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade readers and skilled adult readers. Suggests that the size of perceptual span is variable and influenced by text difficulty. Concludes that the size of perceptual span does not cause slow reading rates in beginning readers. (Author/DR)