The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

Many people have serious difficulties in understanding rational numbers, limiting their ability to interpret and make use of them in modern daily life. This also leads to later difficulties in learning more advanced mathematical content. In this study, novel tasks are used to measure 263 late primary school students' spontaneous focusing on…

The effects of psycholinguistic variables are critical to the evaluation of theories about the cognitive reading system. However, reading research has tended to focus on the impact of key variables on average performance. We report the first investigation examining variation in psycholinguistic effects across the life span, from childhood into old…

Many children learning English as an additional language (EAL) show reading comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding. However, the relationship between early language and reading comprehension in this group is not fully understood. The language and literacy skills of 80 children learning English from diverse language backgrounds and 80…

We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference…

Participants in a longitudinal study, selected according to Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test scores administered in the 1930s, and their occupations, took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Data suggest persons increase in mental abilities over time while maintaining IQ positions relative to peers. Changes in IQ are not related to occupational…

This study describes the developmental function and cross-age pattern of individual differences in mental test behavior during the first 5 years of life. Accompanying the study are brief commentaries by Ina C. Uzgiris and Earl S. Schaefer and a reply by the authors. (JMB)

The relative effects of chronological age, mental age, IQ or Piagetian task performance were investigated among 143 Ss of high, average, and low IQ. Two kinds of group comparisons were made on fifteen tasks: (1) groups of the same chronological age, but different mental age and IQ, and (2) groups of the same mental age, but different chronological…

Delineates the current consensus regarding the nature and the development of intellectual ability. Examines when one would expect general abilities to moderate the relationship among domain-specific and other processes. Reviews recent studies in which general abilities were used as independent variables or covariates. Suggests that generally,…

A reanalysis of Stephens' intercorrelations of Wechsler subtests, achievement tests, and Piagetian tasks was conducted. (EJ 055 112) Piagetian tasks contributed almost equally to the definition of the general factor in intelligence along with the Wechsler subtests and the achievement tests. Communality outweighed differences between intelligence…

Studied 72 children for whom the following data were available: IQ score on a conventional test (WISC or Stanford-Binet); Goodenough-Harris drawing test IQ score; and behavior description by the test administrator. Personality traits of children who performed better on either the graphic or conventional IQ test were assessed. (SJL)