Across three experiments involving four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the same pattern of ability to sequence events was found: familiar events in forward order were the easiest to sequence, then unfamiliar events in forward order, familiar events in backward order, and finally unfamiliar events in backward order. (Author/RH)

This study investigated whether syntactic complexity exerts an influence on the frequency of stuttering in the speech of seven adolescents who stuttered and seven who were normally fluent. Although normal disfluencies and errors in repetition accuracy increased as syntactic complexity increased, stuttering frequency did not appear to be affected…

Clause, syllable, and response latency characteristics of conversational utterances were assessed in 14 boys who stuttered and 14 normally fluent boys. Findings suggest that changes in the number of clausal constituents that must be constructed, stored, or coordinated within an utterance may influence the likelihood of speech errors and, hence,…

Linguistic performance of 7 children (mean age=68 months) with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and average intelligence was evaluated. Subjects dealt with the semantic-pragmatic requirements of linguistically posed problems in an age-appropriate manner. Performance declined as task demands increased but no more than performance of nondisabled…

This study with 56 students (mean age 15 years) with mental retardation and 53 nonretarded students (matched for mental age) found that students with mental retardation were more likely to rely on all kinds of external cues (task-relevant, incidental, or misleading) in problem solving, especially when the preceding task had been difficult.…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…

A study was made to determine whether there exists a group of overpersisting children who are considered mastery-oriented because of their persistence but who actually demonstrate characteristics of learned helplessness. Subjects were 71 females and 84 males from fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms. Children's scores on the Intellectual…

Although research in goal setting has demonstrated that specific, difficult goals lead to better performance, more refined research on the affect of participative decision making and supportive leadership on goal setting has produced ambiguous results. To investigate the relative importance of goal setting, leader supportiveness, and task…

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…

When kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, and college students listened to stories and were asked to predict and explain the story character's behavioral or emotional reaction to a new event, the use of personality attributions to predict and explain future reactions increased with age. (RH)

The purpose of the study was to determine whether particular aspects of movement control influenced the performance of 2-year-old children on a standard developmental test, and thus influenced assessments of intellectual progress based on that test. Six cerebral-palsied (CP) children were compared with six children not suffering motor system…