Investigated whether anxious children favor the processing of threatening or concern-related information. Tested 47 "high anxious" and "low anxious" children in stressful (medical center) and neutral (classroom) situations, and 50 such subjects in only non-stressful situations. Found that both high and low anxious children gave priority to…

Researchers found that children who were lexical readers (those who read words as units) tended to make more errors involving partial lexical information when spelling irregular words than those who were sublexical readers (those who translated letters into sounds when reading). Sublexical readers tended to spell non-words better and to make more…

Two experiments examined the structure of rime and status of the coda as a unit in syllables. Found that children had less difficulty learning a word game which kept the final consonant cluster intact than one which broke it up. The more robust type of coda cluster was as coherent a unit as clusters in the onset position. (EAJ)

Recommends that when repeated-measures Latin-square designs are used to counterbalance treatments across a procedural variable or to reduce the number of treatment combinations given to each participant, effects be analyzed statistically, and that in all uses, researchers consider alternative interpretations of the variance associated with the…

Examined a blank comparison method for evaluating emergent symbol mapping and learning of new word: picture matching relations by 3- to 5-year olds. Found that the method had considerable promise for advancing theoretical analyses of emergent mapping in behavior analytic and developmental language research. (KB)

Used path analysis in two experiments to examine possibility that age difference in infants' long-term retention were artifacts of correlated differences in learning rates or learning opportunities. Found that developmental declines in forgetting rates between 12 and 18 months were independent of developmental differences in learning. Age…

Used writing tasks recorded on a computer-monitored XY tablet to differentiate between normal variations in psychomotor development and dysgraphia in 16 young children. Found that control of spatial accuracy, not allograph retrieval or size control, discriminated dysgraphic children from others. Poor writers were less accurate than proficient…

Investigated preschoolers' suggestible responses on memory tests. Found that exposure to misleading information produced significantly less accurate responses under nonexplicit questioning in recognizing the original from the misleading information than consistent information exposure. Explicit questioning produced more accuracy at seven weeks…

Investigated 4- to 6-year olds' creation and use of external representation strategies in problem solving. Found that direct training and increasing salience of task dimensions increased use of external representations. Four-year olds showed a utilization deficiency in external representation strategy use in the prompt conditions, but not in the…

Examined possibility that arousability as manifested in sensitization contributes to individual differences in infants' attentional profiles. Sensitization tended to occur more frequently with more complex than with less complex checkerboards. Infants showing sensitization looked longer and did not habituate as readily as infants who showed no…

Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose the object with the…

Examined the benefits of a peer collaborative activity on cognitive strategy use and effectiveness and on metacognitive understanding of strategy use. Found that interaction with children working at a higher level of metacognitive knowledge increased strategy use and induced higher levels of metacognitive thinking. Use of sorting strategy and…

Maintains that Judith Bowey's data and theoretical evaluation undermine her conclusion that phonological short-term memory does not mediate long-term phonological learning. Her assessment of nonword repetition may have reduced the measure's reliability, leading to a low association with vocabulary and unexpectedly high performance. Her assumptions…

Contends that links between phonological memory and receptive vocabulary should be interpreted cautiously. Explains modifications to nonword repetition task procedures. Argues that further work is necessary to determine if children's phonological memory, and not general phonological processing abilities, contributes to vocabulary acquisition. The…

Children and adults were tested on their beliefs about whether visual processes involved intromissions (visual input) or extramissions (visual output) across a variety of situations. Results were inconsistent with the idea that simple experiences increase or reinforce a coherent theory of vision and have implications for understanding the nature…