Investigates the ability of 63 children between five and six years of age to interpret ambiguous messages. Three studies were made into the relationship between children's uncertainty about the correctness of their interpretation of an ambiguous message and their judgment of the quality of that message. (Author/CI)

A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated.…

Studies the effect of eight prearranged situations on the prosocial, problem, and task-related behavior of three hyperactive boys. Behaviors assessed included adult, peer, and target-child attention given and received; compliance; aggression; disruption; task involvement; and percentage of tasks correctly completed. (Author/CI)

Investigates the ability of 24 children ages two, three, and four to discriminate between two small object collections on the basis of numerosity and to maintain that discrimination across changes in number-related cues. Most children learned the discrimination and transferred their learning on the basis of relational cues. (Author/CI)

Facility in shifting between familiar schemata in a listening comprehension task was examined in children from the third and sixth grades. Analyses of free recall and interview responses showed deficiencies in children's cognitive monitoring of the prose-schema interaction. (Author/CI)

Researched the possibility that four- to six-year-old children are competent and systematic classifiers, at least making classifications by overall similarity. In three experiments, young children classified various sets of multidimensional stimuli that could be organized into catagories by overall similarity or by diminsional attributes. Children…

Studied 54 kindergarten children to investigate whether a common cognitive capacity underlies both homonym understanding and conservation status. Results indicated conservation status is significantly related to homonym understanding, over and above the rate of the child's general vocabulary level. (Author/CI)

Investigated 96 third-grade boys' and girls' tutoring of 96 first-grade boys and girls in three reward conditions: performance contingent, noncontingent reward, and no reward. Findings indicated that neither the tutor's teaching style nor the tutee's posttest performance was adversely affected by the reward. (Author/CI)

A total of 30 infants with an average age of 83.4 days were trained for one l8-minute, two nine-minute, or three six-minute sessions separated by 24-hour intervals in order to investigate long-term retention of operant foot kicking acquired in the mobile conjugative reinforcement paradigm. (Author/CI)

In two experiments, 5- to 13-year-old children mentally tracked the rotation of a pointer around a circular backdrop to indicate the pointer's imagined position on a backdrop at the sound of a signal. Results indicated that children older than eight years generated linear distance x time functions indicating mental tracking but that younger…

A total of 30 third- and fourth-grade students, ages 8 to 10 years, were observed systematically over two school days to examine the nature of instruction and academic responding time for students at varying levels of teacher-perceived behavioral competence. Findings concerned the relationship between responding times and achievement. (Author/CI)

Determines some of the reasons for developmental differences in retrieval variability. The critical manipulation involved the use of semantic orienting questions at both acquisition and retrieval; elementary school children (7 and 10 years of age) and adults participated. (Author/CI)

Two experiments studied nine-year-olds, l3-year-olds, and adults in their encoding of two kinds of stimuli taken from a psychometric measure of spatial aptitude. The first experiment used letter-like stimuli; the second employed multi-element flags. (CI)

Investigates the relationship between five- and seven-year-old children's communicative performance and their level of understanding about message ambiguity and communication failure. Level of understanding about communication was assessed by asking the child to ascribe blame for communication failure following an ambiguous message and to judge…

Three experiments using beginning readers of Dutch (seven and eight years old) as subjects provide evidence that visually recognizing the unique graphemic structure of words is important in word identification, even in early stages in learning to read. Results are discussed regarding the importance of building accurate graphemic entries in the…