A wealth of developmental research suggests that preschoolers are capable of reporting, imitating, and performing sequential actions they engage in routinely. However, few studies have explored the developmental and cognitive mechanisms required for learning how to perform such routines. A previous computational model of routines argued that a…

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

The South African National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy was approved by the South African Cabinet in 2015. Given capacity and financial constraints, all services outlined cannot be implemented in a single step. Priorities must be set. We examine the budget implications (total cost and cost per child) and benefits of the four…

This research arose from the need to consolidate a meaningful bilingual methodology for children from three to five years of age from low socioeconomic backgrounds belonging to the public education system, where they could begin learning English and Spanish by means of a bilingual methodology that provides them with the same opportunities as…

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…

The present experiments were aimed at testing Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) assumption that representational flexibility in drawing behavior requires the relaxation of a sequential constraint. A total of two hundred and forty 5- to 9-year-old children produced cross-category drawings (e.g., a house with wings) in 4 conditions. The results indicated…

One hundred 18-month-olds were tested using sequential touching and following 4 different priming contexts using sets of toys that could be simultaneously categorized at either the basic or global level. An exact expression of the expected mean sequence length for arbitrary categories was derived as a function of the number of touches made, and a…

Makes a case for a sequential approach to teaching foreign languages middle schools and suggests that in the middle school must encompass both the goals of proficiency and exploration; the integrated exploratory model is more compatible with child development; exploratory can be a launching pad into sequential courses; after an exploratory…

A sequential-touching task was used to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can rapidly change how they categorize a set of objects, recognizing new groupings of objects they had previously categorized in a different way. When presented with a collection of objects that could be categorized by shape (balls vs. blocks) or material (soft vs.…