Investigates the metalinguistic ability of monolingual or bilingual children between five and nine years of age on two language tasks (grammaticality judgment and correction). (HOD)

Reports free and cued recall experiments in which a new model was used to obtain measurements of age changes in storage and retrieval. Participants were 7- and 11-year-olds. Findings concern (1) contributions of storage and retrieval to memory development; (2) effects of errors and successes on memorization; and (3) difficulty of storing and…

Study One examined Swedish and American children's understanding of what constitutes fair criteria for the distribution of goods (i.e., distributive justice). Study Two compared children's distributive justice in family and peer contexts, and Study Three attempted a longitudinal assessment of distributive justice reasoning in two different…

This paper proposes a method to measure and understand prereader listening comprehension skills. The listening span test taxes storage and processing functions of working memory. Used in two experiments with 44 preschoolers, this test had greater predictive and theoretical value than both the traditional word span measure and the age variable.…

A total of 122 kindergartners, third and fifth graders viewed 30 pictures of familiar objects and interested on their free recall of the object names and their recognition of the original pictures. Half received instruction in adult recognition strategies, half in adult recall strategies. (MS)

This special issue of the Mensa Research Journal contains four papers written by K. Warner Schaie, a psychologist who focuses on psychological development from young adulthood through old age. The first paper is "Living with Gerontology." In it, Schaie recounts his own childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, his path to becoming a…

Noting that gender may be an important issue when studying relations between attachment and social functioning, four studies explored whether the relationship between children's internal working models of attachment and their general functioning was gender specific. A total of 246 children, ages 5 to 10 years, were given the Separation Anxiety…

The relationship of age and developmental differences to modeling and motor skill development were examined. Comparisons of the observational learning patterns of four- and five-year-old children and of seven- and eight-year-olds suggest that their physical and cognitive capacities call for different instructional strategies. (Author/PP)

Describes and discusses the rule-assessment approach, a new research strategy for studying developmental sequences in children's acquisition of knowledge. Four experiments were conducted to illustrate the utility of this approach across a variety of concepts and a wide range of ages (three-year-olds to college students). (Author/CM)

Fifth- and sixth-graders were tested with multiple-choice fact and inference questions about a reading passage, then given feedback either with or without the text present. Retesting occurred four days later. Results corroborated recent findings on age-related improvement in inferential processing comprehension and memory. (Author/SJL)

Eighty adolescents, grades 7-9, were assessed on empathy development and perceived competencies. Females proved more empathic than males, but no developmental trends in empathy development were observed. Social competence was positively associated with empathic skills, but cognitive and physical competencies showed a negative association,…

Describes a study that investigated the development of pattern recognition and pattern reversal in 20 deaf children aged six through eight and its relation to age of exposure to a gestural symbol system. (Author/DS)

Reveals a two-factor structure (general retentiveness and memory) in the Wechsler Memory Scale for total male and female samples and for both males and females aged 13 to 39 years and 40 to 59 years but not for males or females aged 60 to 88 years. (Author/RL)

Two experiments on children's inferences and associative memory provided a supportive test of fuzzy-trace theory. Results indicated that false recognition of associated instances with delay declined for all children, and categorical inferences increased for older children. Verbatim memory and inferences were uncorrelated under short delay but…