Currently, professionals disagree about whether children should be informed about their illnesses and the possibility of their deaths. Some experts feel discussion of these subjects would only upset the children while others feel this knowledge is the children's right and will allay the children's anxieties. What is needed but not available is…

The convergence of several lines of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research suggests possible explanations for age-related influences on language acquisition. These factors, which include cognitive development, sociocultural context, affective factors, and language input, can be helpful to language educators. By being alert to the cognitive…

This study tested the hypothesis that category naming is more difficult than instance naming because it requires suppression of readily available instance names. In experiment 1, junior kindergarten and grade one children named pictures of single objects under two conditions: "own" name (i.e., instance or basic level) or…

Two studies examined the effects of different types of imaginal elaborations on recall. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and college adults were given 20 word pairs embedded in one of four types of sentences: short plausible, bizarre, personalized, or self-generated. With no mention of a memory test, subjects were asked to use the…

A study of early identification ratings gathered on six cohorts of kindergarten children (N = 14,793) over the school years 1978-79 to 1983-84 revealed substantial relationships between these ratings and students' sex, socioeconomic status, and month of birth. The relationships of early identification ratings in the area of language to these three…

An auditory recall task involving central and incidental stimuli designed to correspond to processes used in selective attention, was presented to elementary school students. Older children and girls performed better than younger children and boys, especially when animals were the relevant and food the irrelevant stimuli. (DP)

A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play…

This demonstration study examines the affective reactions of infants when they imitate or fail to imitate play behavior modeled by an adult. Subjects were twenty-four 18-month-old and twenty-four 24-month-old male and female infants. Each infant visited the laboratory twice with an inter-session interval of 48 hours. At each session, the infant…

This paper presents an overview of the development of play in children from 9 to 34 months of age, focusing specifically on those aspects of play which occur with sufficient consistency to function as markers for judging developmental progress in clinical populations of young children. A procedure for assessing the sophistication of spontaneous…

Earlier studies found that recall scores of information central to the task increased with age while incidental information recall scores remained constant. This study repeated the earlier ones modifying procedures of instructions, testing, and schedule of recall. Also, it tested the effect of labeling pictorial stimuli. The sample of 253 children…

This study investigates the relationship between Ghanaian children's acquisition of conservation and their age, parental profession and schooling or lack of schooling. Subjects were 120 females, 40 in each of three age groups (6-7, 8-9 and 10-11 years). Half of the subjects in each group had parents in traditional African professions such as…

This study investigated the interrelationships among the development of role-taking skills, moral judgments, and sharing behavior of boys and girls in K-3. A total of 160 lower middle class white children (20 boys and 20 girls from each grade) participated in the study. Data were collected on four measures: (1) sharing candy with a friend, (2)…

The main problem of this study was to examine the set characteristics of children at various age levels. Subjects were observed according to their ease of excitability and extinction in the haptic and visual modalities. Set patterns were examined at different age levels to determine if there was any trend from one age to another. The findings…

To investigate developmental differences in timesharing performance, 60 boys, 20 in each of three age groups (7-, 10- and 13-year-olds), performed an auditory matching task and a tracking task alone and concurrently, the latter under two sets of instructions. Decrements produced by concurrent performance were compared for the three age groups.…

This paper examines several recent lines of research concerning category clustering and describes an alternative to the standard category clustering procedure used to study recall organization in younger children. The specific issue considered is the age at which children first show evidence of spontaneous category clustering in their free-recall.…