Examined age differences in the missing-letter effect during letter-detection tasks. Found expected increase in magnitude with age of the effect even when function words and content words were equated for frequency. Word scrambling improved letter detection in function words compared to content words among older subjects, arguing against increased…

Examined implicit learning ability in 6- and 10-year olds and adults as assessed by a serial reaction-time task, along with retention of knowledge after one week and explicit knowledge developed by children. Found no age-related difference in serial reaction-time performance, consistent with the idea that implicit learning abilities may be…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

Two experiments used paired-comparisons to investigate 3-month olds' recognition of dynamic visual events after various retention intervals. Results indicated a changing pattern of attentional preferences over time consistent with models of infant recognition memory in which novelty, familiarity, and null preferences are considered conjointly and…

Used path analysis in a longitudinal study to examine the relation of overestimating one's capabilities with enhanced performance in German 8- to 11 year-olds. Found that after controlling for gender, school grade, prior academic achievement, and intelligence, overestimating one's capabilities was consistently associated with subsequent school…

Two experiments evaluated young children's use of lexical inference. Found that equivalent transfer occurred when both clue-word pronunciation and orthography were present at transfer and when only the pronunciation of the clue word was given, but not when the clue word was pre-taught. Improvements from pre-taught clue words sharing rimes or vowel…

Three experiments examined characteristics of a stimulus-cueing retrieval from long-term memory for 3-month olds. Used mobiles displaying either Qs (feature-present stimuli) or Os (feature-absent stimuli) and tested 24 hours later. Findings indicated that target-distractor similarity constraints, whether or not a feature-present stimulus, would…

Investigated 7-month olds' ability to relate vowel sounds with objects when intersensory redundancy was present versus absent. Found that infants detected a mismatch in the vowel-object pairs in the moving-synchronous condition but not in the still or moving-asynchronous condition, demonstrating that temporal synchrony between vocalizations and…

Examined phonological skills of children during their first two years of learning to read. Found that segmentation was strongly correlated with reading and spelling attainment at the end of the first year of school; letter-name knowledge predicted reading and spelling skill and interacted with segmentation skills. Rhyming predicted spelling skills…

Maintains that the Rhyme Detection measure used by Muter et al. (1997) is problematic and that counting onset as well as rhyme choices would yield a score predictive of reading, spelling, and phoneme tasks. Argues that this result would be consistent with the hypothesis that sensitivity to onset and rhyme plays a part in children's reading and…

Presents data showing that the Rhyming Detection instructions do not have the effect claimed by Bryant (1998). Argues that Bryant's new measure reflects children's global sensitivity to sound similarities between different words and provides no convincing support for his conclusion. Concludes that their evidence supports the view that phonemic…

Details two experiments examining transfer effects across contextual and linguistic boundaries with poor readers. Concludes that non-fluent readers do not completely integrate surface characteristics (words) and the message of the text. Word-level representations remain free to support transfer across various processing episodes. Maintains that a…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that individual differences in look-duration during infancy covary with different modes of visual intake and encoding, with longer look-durations reflecting encoding based on prolonged inspection of local visual properties, and briefer durations reflecting encoding based on a global, or global-to-local…

Used multigroup scaling models to separate the contributions of cognitive style from ability in school-age children's performance on Figural Intersection Test. Results showed that field-dependent children had greater odds of success than field-independent children when the task's mental-attentional demand was above the child's mental-attentional…

Compared perceptual and conceptual implicit and explicit memory performance of preschool, elementary, and college students. Found that conceptual explicit memory improved with age. Perceptual explicit memory and implicit memory showed no developmental change. Perceptual processing during study led to better performance than conceptual processing…