The study involving 54 learning disabled (LD) students (7 to 11 years old) and 54 regular class students (3 to 7 years old) investigated the developmental patterns for the comprehension of complex temporal references. Three types of stimulus sentences were designed to test the comprehension of temporal references employing the temporal…

Three studies compared 3-year-olds' ability to attribute fact beliefs and value beliefs to another person when these beliefs differed from the children's. Value beliefs concerned the tastes and smells of substances, and whether stimuli were pretty or not. Numbers of subjects involved in the three studies were 32, 16, and 20. The consistent finding…

This study assessed the accuracy of judgments of 100 school-age children (5-11 years of age) as to the presence of real fruit content in three sets of cereals and beverages advertised on TV: real fruit, nonfruit, and artificially flavored products. In the baseline session accuracy increased with age, but children at each age misjudged the real…

A study to investigate the development of children's ability to relate concepts and thus understand metaphors by examining their performance on three concept-relating tasks is reported. Abstract-metaphoric, concrete-metaphoric, and literal taxonomic relationships were embedded in an analogy-like binary choice task. In this type of task, the…

This study attempted to determine: (1) whether lower-order units (agent or agent-action) within the agent-action-recipient relationship exist in any functional way in the 1-word infant's comprehension of speech; and (2) whether the use of repetition and/or reduced length (common modifications in adult-to-infant speech) used to focus on these…

This paper reports a follow-up study of 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old subjects who had participated in an investigation of the nature of children's and adults' ability to graphically represent expressive qualities (i.e., happy, sad, angry, loud, quiet, hard). In the original study, the use of literal representation (such as a smiling face on a tree) and…

A total of 100 children from divorced and separated families were compared with 100 children from intact families in this investigation of ways in which children handle the concepts of family membership and relationships. Children were given two social and two physical tasks: a family identity task; Piaget's interview for determining the…

Findings from a study of 47 children between 3.5 and 12 years of age who received tonsillectomies at a children's hospital are presented. During a home visit before hospitalization, the child's adjustment, cognition, temperament, and family characteristics were assessed. Tonsillectomies were followed by an overnight stay at the hospital, and…

This study analyzed children's comprehension of teacher directives at three levels of clarity. A total of 64 subjects, ages 5 1/2, 7 1/2, 9 1/2 and 11 1/2, participated. Photographic slides of teacher-pupil directive interactions paired with tape recorded teacher directives were presented to subjects under one of four levels of verbal context:…

A series of experiments investigated 5- to 17-month-olds' comprehension of adults' direction of gaze and manual pointing behaviors. Findings indicated that a change in the adult's direction of gaze and orientation of head does not seem sufficient to enable the infant to reliably localize a referent when the infant must choose between pairs of…

A cognitive training strategy was employed to investigate the nature of development in children's concepts of death. Subjects ranging in age from 3 to 11 years and attending Jewish-affiliated preschools participated in the study. Measures of verbal concept formation, abstract reasoning, general intelligence, and ability to conserve were…

Three studies were conducted with three groups of eighteen autistic children (3-11 years old) matched by age and IQ to developmental aphasic Ss to examine the nature of the cognitive deficit underlying autism. Two experiments were concerned with language comprehension using real and anomalous sentences, while the third investigation was an…

Examines the role of organization in adults' processing of stories. Canonical stories were better recalled than noncanonical stories by all three age groups (young, middle-aged, and old adults), and a variety of measures indicated that older adults' recall was both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of young adults. (SL)

This paper begins by examining two approaches to defining and measuring adolescents' understanding of the public good: (1) theories concerning stages of moral and cognitive development and political socialization; and (2) attitudinal survey methods. Methodological deficiencies of the approaches are identified. The paper presents a new method of…

This paper reports on research designed to examine relationships among analogical reasoning, Piagetian level, and physics achievement. A sample of 37 college students enrolled in a physics course participated in a three-day study and were given tasks designed to measure analogical reasoning ability and Piagetian level. Course achievement was…