Argues that in addition to domains of value, young children recognize distinct domains of truth. Notes that although value judgments have been shown to be differentiated by age 4, research suggests truth judgments may not be similarly differentiated before grade school age. (JPB)

Investigated young children's ability to talk about representational aspects of pretense. Found that 5-year-olds, but very few 4-year-olds, can explain why certain actions should not be called pretending; young children discriminate between pictures of thinking and pretending based on a depiction of action; and preschoolers are less able than…

Four studies explored children's ability to differentiate future distances of events. Findings indicated that 4-year-olds failed to differentiate future distances. Five-year-olds could distinguish events occurring in coming weeks/months from those many months away. Six- through 8-year-olds made more differentiated judgments than younger children…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Two experiments examined children's ability to understand and produce graphic symbols for social communication. Found that 2-year-olds did not effectively produce symbols or use an experimenter's symbols. Three- and 4-year-olds improved their symbols after use in social communication and performed above chance with the experimenter's symbol;…

Examined 7- to 10-year-olds' ability to acquire a domain-general processing strategy--Control of Variables Strategy (CVS)-- and make valid inferences. Found that with explicit training within domains and probe questions, children could learn and transfer the CVS. Probes without direct instruction did not improve CVS and inferential thinking…

When children learn categories, they do not learn isolated facts but rather systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge are composed of property-property (e.g., things with wings tend to have feathers), property-role (e.g., things with eyes tend to eat), and role-role (e.g., things that eat tend to sleep) correlations. Research has shown that…

Several investigators find that infants fail to use property information to individuate objects until 12 months of age (e.g., Xu & Carey, 1996), while others find that infants successfully employ property information in the service of object individuation at 9.5 months (e.g., Wilcox & Baillargeon, 1998a). This study investigated…

The use of four types of psychological state words (physiological, emotional, desire, and cognitive) during mother-child play sessions at ages 3, 4, and 5 years was examined in 30 children diagnosed with delayed expressive language at 24-31 months and 15 age-matched comparison children with typical development. The children's mean length of…

This study explored children's development of a "mental time line" and considered the propositions that younger children view the temporal domain as bi-polar, while older children display signs of using finer gradations on their mental time ruler that approach conventional structures of clock and calendar time. Subjects were a group of…

This study examined the influence of misleading information on children's memory of a real-life event. After participating in a play session, 10 three-year-old children and 10 six-year-old children heard a narrative that included inaccurate information about the play session. The children were then presented with items from the play session (event…

This study investigated the relationship of cognitive developmental changes to physiological and anatomical changes by measuring both types of data within the same subjects. Cortical electrical activity was measured in 24 males between 10 and 12 years of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from midline scalp electrodes during a…

The present study investigates the acquisition of basic language concepts with children 4 and 5 years of age, and the relationship of language to cognitive development as measured by performance on 10 Piagetian tasks. Factors of age, day care setting or kindergarten, and sex constituted the independent variables. Children 4 years of age proved to…

A study investigating developmental differences in the ability to reason with conditional propositions used five variations of Wason's selection task to assess conditional reasoning in 132 eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade adolescents. In addition to examining developmental differences, the study had as an objective to examine the role of semantic…

Recent work suggests that the apparent shift from thematic to taxonomic concept organization reflects changes in children's preference for these forms of organization, rather than their capacity. A study was made to assess toddlers' knowledge of the different possible relations for the same concept and to extend the triad method to children under…