We investigated children's understanding of directed motion events using an imitation choice paradigm. A total of 34 children (mean age 33 months) watched a model act out an event containing a manner of motion (hopping or sliding), a motion path (up or down a ramp), and a goal (in or on a bowl). On the children's apparatus, the locations of the…

A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly…

Two studies explored the following two issues important in understanding the development of knowledge-based inferencing: (1) how children of different ages use a circumscribed and available knowledge base to make two types of inferences important for comprehension; and (2) how the accessibility of an available knowledge base is related to…

A total of 96 binary statements were administered to 120 children randomly selected from 3 academic levels. The Constituent Comparison Model accounts for the results obtained in this study. (HS)

The comprehension of big, little, and same number and the production of relational terminology was assessed in 168 preschool children. (Author/BD)

Six experiments were reported which examine the young child's ability to compare included and nonincluded sets. Subjects were children from nursery and primary schools in Edinburgh. (Author/MP)

Four types of semantic relation, assumed by different researchers to be implicated in the organization of semantic information, were investigated by means of false recognition and word association tasks presented to independent samples of 4- and 5-year-old children. (Author/SB)

A sample of 120 first and second graders read and recalled sentences comprised of logograph symbols. Those children who did not demonstrate cognitive integration of the symbols subsequently recalled fewer items and failed to retain the semantic and syntactic structure of sentences. (Author/JMB)

Forty children listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information. Observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between these types of information for developmental studies of memory of prose. (Author/DB)

Two experiments were conducted to test a number of predictions derived from a cognitive theory of humor. (Author)

Two hypotheses were tested about how young children (four-to seven-year-olds) answer questions with the quantifiers "all" and "some": (1) that children use syntactic cues in determining which noun phrase is quantified, and (2) that children evaluate a some-statement as part of evaluating an all-statement. (Author/MP)

Facility in shifting between familiar schemata in a listening comprehension task was examined in children from the third and sixth grades. Analyses of free recall and interview responses showed deficiencies in children's cognitive monitoring of the prose-schema interaction. (Author/CI)

Sixteen four year olds and 16 six year olds were shown four picture stories consisting of 15 to 18 pictures without text, in order to examine children's comprehension and memory for stories. (MP)

Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Tested competing hypotheses about the acquisition of terms that refer to relationships in both time and space. Hypotheses were as follows: (1) language of time is acquired as a spatial metaphor; and (2) differential experience with the dual senses of each term results in different acquisition patterns depending upon which sense dominates actual…