Given limitations in the integrative scope of past research, basic questions about the organization and development of preschoolers' living kinds concept remain open to debate. This study was designed to address past limitations through use of a longitudinal design, extensive stimulus set, and alternate indices of understanding. Thirty-five…

Four studies explored preschoolers' understanding of thought bubbles depicted in cartoons. Few three- and four-year olds knew what a thought-bubble depiction was without instruction, but if simply told that the thought bubble "shows what someone is thinking," the majority easily understood the devices as depicting thoughts generally and…

Infants of 14 months of age demonstrated significantly improved understanding of containment as a result of a training intervention in which they played with cans and tubes in their homes for a month. After training, their test scores were similar to those of untrained 20-month-old children. (RH)

Administration of a placement task to 66 preschool and grade school children revealed that the concept of higher/lower was understood earlier than above/below, which in turn was understood earlier than rising/falling. Within each pair of terms, the one referring to upness was comprehended earlier. (Author/JMB)

Acquisition of sentient-nonsentient distinction in 48 children between four- and seven-years-of-age occurred later than animate-inanimate distinction. The children's use of naturalistic or nonnaturalistic explanations depended on the logical nature of events in which objects were involved rather than familiarity with objects themselves. Ability to…

When preschool children think of objects as organized into collections (e.g., forest, army) they solve certain problems better than when they think of the same objects as organized into classes (e.g., trees, soldiers). Present studies indicate preschool children occasionally distort natural language inclusion hierarchies (e.g., oak, tree) into the…

While viewing a televised drama with second-grade children, adults stated implicit relationships between important explicitly portrayed events. Children who heard the facilitating commentary scored significantly better on understanding of implicit program content related to the adult's statements than did children who heard neutral comments.…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Results of three experiments suggest that, in contrast to the claims made by Wimmer and others (1988), three- and four-year-old children understand that looking leads to knowing. The three- and four-year-olds' difficulty in the study lay mainly in the form of the questions that they were asked. (RH)

Presents a study which assessed preschool children's understanding of "front,""back," and "side" through a variety of tasks. A developmental sequence is defined. (ED)

Level of cognitive development was not significantly related to humor appreciation for either novelty or incongruity humor in 30 boys at each of three age levels: 5, 7, and 9. (WY)

Examines young children's awareness that an actor's intention to transfer possession or control is a necessary precondition for correct use of the verb "give". Ninety-six four- through six-year-olds were presented with anecdotes in which the actor's behavior was held constant but his subjective goal was varied. (Author/RH)

Children's use of the terms "lie" and "truth" was examined. Participants were 150 subjects in five groups: nursery schoolers, preschoolers, first graders, fifth graders, and adults. Results support the development of definitional prototypes for the concepts of lie and truth. (RH)

Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

Two experiments studied how preschool children acquire a naive theory of kinship (NTK). Overall, results implicate a type of theory building that involves inferences from preexisting knowledge rather than structural change, use of analogy, or acquisition of new knowledge. (DR)