This study compared the linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral performance at 6-8 years of age of eight children born preterm and low birth weight (3-5 pounds) with that of 12 full-term peers. Quantitative analyses of performance profiles for all the children are provided. Findings found no significant differences between groups in linguistic,…

Narratives of a wordless picture story by 33 individuals with Down syndrome (ages 12-26) and 99 typical children were analyzed. Individuals with Down syndrome expressed more plot line and thematic content and retold more of one of the protagonists' misadventures than the children matched for mean length of utterance. (Contains references.)…

This study, with 180 deaf or hard of hearing infants and toddlers grouped into four age ranges, found highly significant interrelationships among the four categories of play and the four aspects of communicative development studied. The development of autosymbolic play, age of hearing loss identification, and symbolic object distribution accounted…

Statistically, women, particularly pregnant women and new mothers, are at heightened risk for depression. The present review describes the current state of the research linking maternal depressed mood and children's cognitive and language development. Exposure to maternal depressive symptoms, whether during the prenatal period, postpartum period,…

When a behavior disappears and then resurfaces, developmental psychologists typically look more closely at the behavior to figure out what is different before and after--that is, they increase the grain with an eye toward discovering how the system that generates that behavior has changed. But what ought to count as a U-shaped phenomenon? How…

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to "Developmental Science" that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection,…

We introduce the thematic collection by noting some striking similarities in the cognitive abilities of human infants and nonhuman primates. What are the implications of these similarities for our comprehension of human infant cognition? After providing a brief historical and conceptual background on comparative behavioral research, we discuss how…

We investigated the developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency learning in an artificial language. Infants were exposed to 1 of 2 artificial languages with utterances of the form [aXc or bXd] (Grammar 1) or [aXd or bXc] (Grammar 2). In both languages, the grammaticality of an utterance depended on the relation between the 1st and 3rd…

This report is the latest in a series of reports investigating the link between high quality early childhood education and economic development. Longitudinal research from national experts indicates that high quality early childhood programs are likely to impart significant social, academic, and economic benefits to the children who participate,…

As part of a larger project concerned with the development of changes in children's understanding of meaning as they become literate, this study examined the age at which listeners begin to acknowledge paraphrasing as a legitimate response to questions about the utterances of characters in stories. Subjects were 54 native English speakers from…

Developed as part of the Family, Infant, and Toddler Project, and intended as a guide for parent groups, the document focuses on such topics as instruction, child development, and family concerns related to children with handicaps. Individual topic guides provide information on ways to begin the parent group meeting, information to consider,…

Describes an experiment undertaken to identify the home experiences of 1- to 3-year-old children which result in competence at the age of 6. (BRT)

Shows that one of the most general processes in the development of cognitive structures consists in replacing exogenous knowledge by endogenous reconstructions that reconstitute the same forms but incorporate them into systems whose internal composition is a pre-requisite. Biologically equivalent process is discussed. (Author/AM)

Research on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development is reviewed, and two complementary models of bilingualism are developed to account for research results. It is suggested that research since 1960 shows a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development, at least for some types of bilingualism. The advantage or…