This study investigated whether instruction that involves comparing the equal sign with other relational symbols is more effective at imparting a relational interpretation of the equal sign than instruction about the equal sign alone. Third- and fourth-grade students in a comparing symbols group learned about the greater than, less than, and equal…

In their lead articles, both Kowalski and Zimiles (2006) and O'Hanlon and Roberson (2006) declare a general relation between color term knowledge and the ability to conceptually represent color. Kowalski and Zimiles, in particular, argue for a priority for the conceptual representation in color term acquisition. The complexities of the interaction…

Reports two experiments: 1) to determine whether children perform as adults in the simple and successive-reversal concept identification problems and to assess their retention of stimulus-response information; and 2) to determine the associative strength of the pain of response words. (Author/AJ)

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was…

Tested the hypothesis that fourth-graders have a greater tendency than first-graders to represent transformations as ordered series of beginning, middle, and end states. Predominantly constructed states of fourth-graders were components of continuous movements or transformations, whereas those of first-graders related to the experimenters' on the…

Investigates potential causes of decrements in children's understanding of the words "big" and "tall" by comparing results of studies of English-speaking children and results of a study of Arabic-speaking children. (Author/RH)

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

Evaluated the possibility that three-year-olds solve small-number conservation problems by an empirical procedure whereby the sets are quantified each time presented. Children chose the more numerous of two arrays, one containing two elements and the other three elements. Results disconfirmed claims that three-year-olds can conserve small numbers.…

Kindergarten and first grade children were trained to choose the middle-sized stimulus in either a single stimulus set or in each of two nonoverlapping stimulus sets. Findings were reported in terms of the assumption that cognitive processes are important in the intermediate-sized transposition paradigm. (Author/DB)

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

Infants 8.5 and 9.5 months of age were tested for ability to determine the location of an object hidden in one of two covered containers before their left-right positions were reversed. Only the older infants provided with different colored covers to their containers were able to do this task. (Author/DB)

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…

Showed that in a task requiring judgments about the concept of "more" based on the relative numerosity of sets, three- to four-year-old children may base their judgments on such parameters as the extent to which the sets are homogeneous with respect to the color of their components. (Author/DB)

A total of 84 Israeli middle- and upper-middle-class nursery school, second and fifth grade children were subjects for a study investigating parallel shifts in dimensional salience and the dominance of these dimensions as organizing principles in memory. (MS)