There is evidence for developmental hierarchies in the type of information to which infants attend when reasoning about objects. Investigators have questioned the origin of these hierarchies and how infants come to identify new sources of information when reasoning about objects. The goal of the present experiments was to shed light on this debate…

The relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear were investigated in 5 experiments involving approximately 156 college students (most attended the University of Pennsylvania). Findings support the view that the syntax of verbs is a regular, although complex, projection from their semantics. (SLD)

Trial-by-trial strategy assessments and a microgenetic design were used to examine the learning of rules for solving balance scale problems by 70 4- and 70 5-year olds. Developmental differences in learning that emerged seemed to reflect both distal and proximal influences. Encoding and initial rule use were related to different learning process…

The conceptual categories that children have developed in their second year were studied in five experiments using object manipulation tasks. Subjects included 152 children from 18 to 31 months of age. These very young children had formed global conceptions of many domains of objects. (SLD)

Two experiments involving 49 3- and 47 4-year-old French preschoolers studied their memories for racial and other social information to test claim that perceptual factors are integral to derivation and representation of racial categories. Results cast doubt on claim that perceptual information is crucial component of racial categories and are more…