Uses multidimensional scaling procedures to investigate developmental changes in the ability of 80 male subjects (aged seven, nine, 12, or adult) to process previously unfamiliar faces. Suggests that improvement in face recognition ability at age 10 results from an increased ability to consider more features simultaneously. (Author/BE)

Assesses five- and 10-year-old children's understanding of second-order belief structures in acted stories in which two characters were independently informed about an object's unexpected transfer to a new location. Results show unexpected early competence around age six or seven under optimal conditions when inference of second-order beliefs is…

Examined whether a holistic magnitude relation governs children's object comparisons. Objects varying on two dimensions of magnitude, size, and saturation were classified by three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Results indicated that younger children were sensitive to global magnitude as well as to overall similarity. (Author/BE)

Reports an experiment on the rapid naming of printed letter strings by third- and fifth-grade Yugoslavian children. As is consistent with previous experiments on adults, the phonologically ambiguous form of a word or pseudoword was named much more slowly than the phonologically unambiguous form. (Author/BE)

Evaluates use of spelling-sound correspondences to read and spell by third-graders defined as good readers and good spellers, good readers and poor spellers, or poor readers and poor spellers. Indicates that all groups used correspondences but that children in mixed and poor groups used them less systematically and had weaker knowledge of…

Over a two-week period, examined the effectiveness of integrative imagery strategy over concrete enaction and repetition strategies for improving kindergartners' recall of pictograph sentences. (Author/BE)

Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to auditory and visual signals. Results showed that adults and seven-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. While not entirely consistent, results with four-year-olds suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision.…

Five experiments using identical reflex modification procedures on neonates and adults suggest developmental differences in processing auditory stimuli. Neonates failed to exhibit reflex inhibition by either prior acoustic or tactile stimuli. Adults exhibited robust reflex inhibition to these same stimuli. Developmental processes implied by these…

Three experiments investigated the dynamics of human infant visual fixation. Results showed that, over a series of trials, four-month-olds fixate longer on a complex than on a simple stimulus. Findings challenge prevailing cognitive-schema theories as a complete account of the dynamics of infant visual fixation. A two-process theory that accounts…

Free recall performance of children in grades three, five, seven, and nine and of adults was assessed according to a list of categorically related words. Results indicated that seventh and ninth graders were more apt to use associative relations to begin category clusters than were younger children or adults. (Author/BE)

Confirmed the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes self-denial when children fear that excessive self-gratification violates a moral rule. Results with 112 White, middle-class, Australian children ages four to five…

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

Reported an experiment on the effects of taxonomic organization on 7- and 11-year-olds' free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists. Analysis used a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivered estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. (Author/CB)

Examined the effects of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of the voiceless fricatives "s" and "sh" by adults and by young children who could and could not produce both sounds. Concluded that productive mastery is not critically responsible for perception of the distinction between the two phonemes or the consequences of sibilant-vowel…

Subjects from kindergarten-age to adult participated in four experiments. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in three experiments activated lights in viewing boxes; in the fourth experiment, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Results supported the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive…