Explores implications of two cognitive development perspectives for characterizing ontogeny of causal reasoning. Reviews literature on causal reasoning in the preschool years and concludes that the hypothesis of an invariant causal scheme is only partially correct. (Author/SO)

A broad literature review revealed that younger children are more likely to categorize objects along complimentary dimensions than older children who tend to categorize according to similarity. This developmental change is discussed in terms of etiology--internal organismic changes or environmental changes. (DP)

To learn how children acquire "metalinguistic competence," the development of the concept of "the word" was experimentally studied in four- to ten-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

Explores age differences in children's conceptions of play, pretending, and toys. Examines parallel structural changes in other areas of development, such as language acquisition. Subjects for the study were 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. (BD)

A dialectical schemata framework was used to interpret, code, and compare 27 interviews on the nature of education with freshmen, seniors and faculty members at a small, highly selective liberal arts college in order to provide a description of the organization of dialectical thinking and its presence in mature thought. (Author/DB)

Biological theories of adaptation are used to generate a model of human cognitive development in which physiological and cognitive change in aged persons can be understood as an adaptive stage of development. Related literature is reviewed that focuses on the elderly as information transmitters and on the psychology of "telling."…

Investigates differences between adolescents and older adults in their explanations of linguistic metaphors. Adults displayed a synthesizing, integrative perspective, while adolescents displayed an analytic perspective in their explanation of metaphors. (Author/SS)

Investigates the effect of various strategy-modeling techniques on the performance of both young children and elderly adults on the 20 Question Task. (Author/MP)

Examination of the way in which children conceive the development of animals shows that there are parallels among concepts of development with those of the periods of concrete operations and formal operations. The conception of development seems to advance further in the subsequent period of dialectical thought. (MS)

Reports on the findings of a comparative study of mental abilities of Mexican and American children. Discusses age, sex, social class, and urban-rural differences, as well as cultural differences. (SS)