Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy are common in our daily communication. This is one of the first studies to investigate metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a developmental approach. Forty-five typically developing individuals participated in a metaphor-metonymy verbal comprehension task incorporating 20 short…

The objective of this work was to highlight the conceptions of force held by students aged 10-17 years old, in situations where animate and inanimate objects interact. In the proposed experimental situations, we varied parameters such as the motion and position of an object and the agent's effort. We asked questions about both inanimate and…

Development of object identity was studied within the framework of a hiding game that varied the objects themselves instead of their spatial positions. (Authors)

This study examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 128; 54% girls) ability to discriminate emotional fantasy and reality. Children viewed images depicting fantastic or real events that elicited several emotions, reported whether each event could occur, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Children were also administered the Play Behavior…

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)

This study attempted to discover the characteristics of the developmental process whereby children follow a sequential pattern in their understanding of social relationships. A questionnaire was administered describing several simple dyadic situations in terms of one person helping or hurting another. The respondents were to indicate whether the…

Taken together, these five studies using structurally different kinds of conceptual problems provide evidence for qualitative developmental and cultural differences in classificatory behavior. (Authors/CB)

The results provide evidence of remarkable consistency in both accuracy and manner of performance from first grade through college age levels. (Authors)

The development of children's conceptualization of various roles appears to parallel general conceptual development. That is, there appears to be a developmental progression from role concepts based on concrete-specific acts and details to those based on general abstract functions. (Author)

Among third, fourth, and fifth graders tested, performance on embedded figures and leveling-sharpening tests correlated with performance on traditional items of class inclusion, suggesting that psychological differentiation is related to reasoning by class inclusion. However, age changes in differentiation do not account for age changes in class…

Examines a general developmental hypothesis concerned with children's understanding of perceptual experience, memory, intentions, and emotions. It is hypothesized that young children view the mind as passive in relation to the external world and regard external events as determining subjective experience, whereas older children know many ways that…

Results showed that reversal shift was easier than extradimensional shift and that relative shift difficulty was unaffected by instructions, in contrast to findings with college-age subjects. (Authors)

Study deals with a comparative developmental analysis of performances on the same task by four age groups. (MB)

Test performance across age groups followed a highly significant linear trend. (Authors)

Two major trends in the development of natural language concepts were found in the present study: (1) there was a clear indication that such concepts exist in a relatively fragmented form in young children; (2) young children showed a strong dependence on perceptual attributes in their definitions of concepts. (Author/CB)