The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between the physical, social, and psychological variables of the family environment and children's developmental performance on measures of cognition, academic achievement, and affective characteristics. A sample of 69 families was administered a multicomponent family assessment…

To learn how children acquire "metalinguistic competence," the development of the concept of "the word" was experimentally studied in four- to ten-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

Two experiments sought to determine whether rehearsal strategies constitute a primary determinant to age-related changes in auditory short-term memory. (ST)

Subjects in grades 2, 6, and college were asked to sort 50 pictures according to several class labels, each with a functional equivalent. (ST)

Study supported in part by U.S. Office of Education Grant.

Age and cognitive developmental level were used as independent variables in order to assess their relative effects on the number and kinds of self-referent constructs used by children and adolescents. Fifty-four 8-year-olds, sixty-four 12-year-olds, and forty-six 16-year-olds were recruited from their respective third, seventh, and eleventh grades…

This review of the current state of research on how children make sense of television and its content examines age-related differences in children's interpretations of television entertainment content in general, and advertising content in particular. A brief analysis and description of the fundamental principles of cognitive development theory…

Changes in manipulative play with objects were examined in a longitudinal sample of 10 boys and 9 girls tested at ages 9, 13, and 18 months. Stability of individual differences in play was also examined. Each child was observed individually for 7 minutes in a room in which a tea set was the only toy present. Seven types of play behavior were…

This study of children's memory was intended to: (1) extend a set of procedures used to study levels of processing in the memory of adults, and (2) study the development of the dynamic memory system unencumbered by developmentally influenced strategies in the areas of metamemory, encoding, organization and storage, and retrieval. Ninety-six…

This study investigated the effects of stimulus presentation rate on primacy-recency effects in children. A modification of the Digit Span task used in the Binet and Wechsler intelligence scales provided the basic memory task administered to 56 male school children in grades kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth. The specific design required…

Prospective remembering (remembering to carry out specific activities at some future time) was investigated in this study. This investigation focused on episodic prospective remembering (memory for actions performed either infrequently or on an irregular basis ) rahter than habitual prospective remembering (memory for actions routinely engaged…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

It was hypothesized that the acquisition of conservation behavior would be facilitated when stimuli were more concrete than abstract. Eighty white second graders were randomly assigned to four groups and presented with three conservation-of-weight problems. Clay balls and the conservation transformations were either shown, demonstrated, and…

This study investigated the effects of sex of child, age, rationale focus, rationale orientation, and maturity of moral judgment on resistance to deviation in 120 children (7 to 11 years old) using the standard punishment paradigm. Children were randomly assigned to a consequence- or intentions-focused rationale with an object or person…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Ivanov-Smolensky procedure as an effective clinical device for the assessment of cognitive development in children under four years old. This procedure, expressly developed for assessing development in children with limited verbal skills, minimizes some of the research problems associated with young…