Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

This study examines children's ability to detect accent-related information in connected speech. British English children aged 5 and 7 years old were asked to discriminate between their home accent from an Irish accent or a French accent in a sentence categorization task. Using a preliminary accent rating task with adult listeners, it was first…

In two separate task conditions, cells of a matrix could be filled either by taking account of only one dimension or by considering both dimensions. Subjects were 80 children 3 to 6 years of age. The majority of three-year-olds failed the two-attribute condition and there was a significant interaction between age and experimental condition.…

Examines developmental differences in category labeling in a communication situation. Adult women and nine-year-old children instructed seven-year-olds in the organization of groceries in a mock kitchen or in the organization of photographs of common objects into compartments as a "homework" assignment. Both adults and children gave more…

The first experiment investigates the ability of children ranging in age from two to five years to use taxonomic and complementary organizational principles in a forced-choice picture recognition task. The second experiment assesses two alternative classes of cues which may have been used by 2-year-olds to mediate their recognition pairings. (RH)

In two experiments, five year olds produced more instances in slot-filler categories than taxonomic categories, and eight year olds produced more instances in taxonomic categories than slot-filler categories; for five year olds, slot-filler categories led to superior recall and shorter response latencies than did taxonomic categories. (BB)

Assessed through two studies the organization and basis for preschool children's (n=240) and adults' (n=60) categorization of emotions. In one, children and adults chose facial expressions that exemplify emotion categories such as fear, anger, and happiness. In another they grouped emotions differing in arousal level or pleasure-displeasure…

Argues that rank order correlations may not be ubiquitously suitable for assessing the relations between children's behavior or characteristics at one age or in one situation, and those shown later or in another context. (HOD)