Changes in children's categorization behavior between 15 and 21 months of age and the relation of these changes to developments in language, object permanence, and means-end understanding are reported. (PCB)

Findings suggest that semantic knowledge for concrete objects is represented and organized in similar ways in autistic, retarded, and normal children. Previous findings on cognitive deficits in autistic children are more likely related to their inability to use cognitive representations in an appropriate and flexible manner. (Author/RH)

Compares developmental changes in the processing of subordinate/superordinate relationships across perceptual and nonperceptual categories. Perceptual categories contained visually similar exemplars, while nonperceptual categories contained dissimilar exemplars. Second, fifth, and eleventh graders, as well as mentally retarded adolescents,…

Assesses the effectiveness of different child-generated classification schemes on preschool children's memory performance. Children who organized pictures according to taxonomic categories (e.g., animals, vehicles) demonstrated significantly greater recall than children classified as nontaxonomic. (Author/MP)

Assesses preschool children's preferences for eight snack foods and tests procedures to modify preferences for certain foods by having children sort foods according to self-determined categories. Enhanced preferences for target foods generalized to other foods in the same category only for children using semantic sorting categories. (Author/DB)

Confirms that infants, like older children, are capable of responding categorically to stimuli of different shapes if these are similar in hue. (PCB)

Three studies examined preschool children's understanding of categorical hierarchies, testing their ability to form categories at different levels of generality and to include the same objects in multiple categories. Found that, contrary to the implications of previous studies, two- and three-year olds appear to have both categorization skills.…

Three experiments explored four and seven year olds' and adults' knowledge of taxonomy, including horizontal relations between items at the same hierarchical level and vertical relations between items at different hierarchical levels. Results showed that four year olds' taxonomic knowledge was restricted to one type of horizontal relationship. (BC)

Three experiments examined the modes of processing that children and adults use in learning family-resemblance categories. Children and adults exhibited primarily analytic, rather than holistic, modes of learning. (PCB)

Three studies examined lexical categorization in 2-year- olds. Findings indicated that even with minimal opportunities to familiarize themselves with novel artifacts, children generalized their names in accordance with the objects' functions, even when they had to discover the functions on their own or when all the test objects had some…

Study 1 asked second through sixth graders, who could answer inclusion questions, to answer such questions without empirical information about relative quantity and to predict whether subordinate classes could be made larger than their superordinate classes. In study 2, children's performance in two part-whole domains, classes and collections, was…

Investigates the perceptual basis of metaphor by asking 5-, 7-, and 10-year-old children and adults to pair and discuss films of natural objects, both stationary and moving. Concludes that motion information makes metaphoric similarity relatively easy to perceive and influences the form of descriptive metaphors. (Author/CB)

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)

A transcript-narrative analysis technique was used to identify interpersonal negotiation strategies of two nine-year-old boys selected from a pool of children with socioemotional and interpersonal difficulties. Strategies were classified according to four developmental levels: impulsive/physical, unilateral/coercive, reciprocal/influential, and…

A component analysis was used to assess the performance of 6-,9-, and 12 year-old children who heard a 36-word list and tried to recall it on two successive trials. (ST)