Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M[subscript age] = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders…

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with…

A test of advanced theory of mind (ToM), first introduced by F. Happe (1994), was adapted for children (mental, human, animal, and nature stories plus unlinked sentences). These materials were closely matched for difficulty and were presented to forty-five 7- to 12-year-olds with autism and 27 control children. Children with autism who showed ToM…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Describes two studies designed to determine how children in first through third grades become aware of their failure to comprehend instructions. Results suggested that children's initial insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is due to a relative lack of constructive processing. (JMB)

Results of three studies suggest that, to notice inconsistencies in prose, children have to encode and store information, draw relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain inferred propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out. (JMB)

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Investigates children's knowledge of the role of message quality in referential communication and their ability to evaluate the accuracy of a listener's feedback about his/her comprehension. Children evaluated a puppet listener's comprehension after they had given complete or inadequate directions and received his report that he did or did not…

In three studies, children between five and ten years of age listened to short stories and answered questions about presented and implied information. Results demonstrated how hypothesis generation, comprehension monitoring, clue integration, and converging evidence influence children's developing inferential reasoning. (Author/MP)

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief…

Investigates the relationship between children's cognitive and affective processes in 30 four and five year olds who were interviewed individually to probe affective understanding, administered a series of Piagetian tasks, and given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Performance on affective and cognitive tasks correlated significantly.…

Preschool- and kindergarten-age children's understanding of the distinct referential properties of collective and class nouns and the relationship between this understanding and performance in part-whole comparison tasks was examined in three experiments. Results indicate children understand the relationship between nouns and the sets to which…

The development of children's comprehension of cause and effect relationships was studied in 68 kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children. (BRT)

Examines the development of metaphor by using structure-mapping theory to make distinctions among kinds of metaphors. Proposes that children can understand metaphors based on shared object attributes before those based on shared relational structure. Results indicate a developmental shift toward focus on relational structure in metaphor…