Describes a study which explored developmental changes in preschoolers' knowledge of the writing system. The children were asked to write four utterances without knowing the purpose of the request and without additional explanations. The purpose was to determine how early children's graphic responses in decontextualized situations have features of…

Recognizes and praises the research of Margaret Donaldson for what it reveals about children's thinking and highlights three central contributions of her work to the understanding of children's language learning. (HOD)

Concludes that the role of the teacher as researcher in children's development of thinking and socialization through play is multi-dimensional. The initial function is the internal analysis of children's thinking and interaction within a variety of settings. (Author)

Discusses a study of reading comprehension of fourth grade students by an instrument constructed by the investigator and based upon Piaget's developmental construct of intelligence. (TO)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Discusses the meaning of accountability and its implications for the child, who becomes involved in educational programs that are designed as a result of that evaluation process. (RK)

The phenomenon of fear of strangers (FS) is reviewed in light of recent findings in neurophysiology, ethology, developmental and cognitive psychology. (Author/TW)

Relates studies of the effects of pre- and post-natal and childhood malnutrition on physical and mental development. Discusses national and international nutrition problems and solutions. (DR)

The issue of whether or not early adolescence is a transitional or stable period of development may be dependent on our ability to describe ways in which early adolescents are quantitatively and qualitatively different from when they were children and how these early adolescent characteristics are forerunners to the more elaborate constructs of…

Some of the findings of a longitudinal study of three infants between their 11th and 22nd months to document development of linguistic expression of the agent concept indicated that first vocalizations were inconsistently associated with nonverbal agentive behaviors and later mature utterances coded agent-action-recipient events. (MC)

Studied how children (N=60) understand social interaction portrayed on television, and how their understanding changes with age. Results showed younger viewers structured televised content in terms of overt descriptive features, action, and literal repetition of dialogue; older children considered inferential aspects of social interaction and…

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment Inventory and the Rheingold and Cook Checklist were respectively used to assess the home environments of children whose mothers were married/working, married/nonworking, or divorced/working. (Author/MP)