Immediate and lasting effects of music or second-language training were examined in early childhood using event-related potentials. Event-related potentials were recorded for French vowels and musical notes in a passive oddball paradigm in thirty-six 4- to 6-year-old children who received either French or music training. Following training, both…

The neurocognitive development of moral and conventional judgments was examined. Event-related potentials were recorded while 24 adolescents (13 years) and 30 young adults (20 years) read scenarios with 1 of 3 endings: moral violations, conventional violations, or neutral acts. Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable…

Mothers read stories to their children (N = 41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book…

Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N=21,255), this study examined dual components of…

Assesses the extent to which certain key behaviors said to involve perspective-taking (specifically, cognitive and affective perspective-taking, and altruism) were related to friendship as opposed to popularity. (Author/MP)

A multivariate modification of the cross-lagged panel correlation paradigm was applied to data from 4 subgroups of students tested and retested in fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades on 16 essentially identical cognitive measures. Results suggested that the test of aural comprehension was tapping the causal factors involved in intellectual…

Aim of the study is to assess empirically the interrelationships among some of Piaget's and Gesell's behavioral tasks. (Author)

In an attempt to evaluate the psychometric credibility of the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) as the operational measure of reflection-impulsivity, a study of the short-term (1 week) reliability of different versions of MFFT for boys and girls at kindergarten, second, and fifth grades was conducted. (Author/SB)

Investigated the ability of three- and four-year-old children to perform tasks which require matching sets of sounds to numerically equivalent visual displays. Findings indicated that three-year-olds performed at the level of chance on the auditory-visual matching task, but four-year-olds performed significantly above chance. (MOK)

This study examined 6- to 8-year-old Slovenian children's acquisition of matrix completion proficiency and compared microgenetic and age-related changes on the task. Microgenetic analyses indicated that: variability of children's errors increased before they discovered the correct strategy, the correct strategy became dominant shortly after…

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

This review of literature on infant habituation and recognition memory performance as predictors of later IQ concludes that the level of prediction is (1) substantial; (2) higher for at-risk than nonrisk children; and (3) not higher than the level of predictions based on parental education and socioeconomic status. (MDM)

Compared low-birthweight children in experimental (LBWE) intervention and no-treatment (LBWC) conditions, and normal birthweight (NBW) children. At age seven, and after SES adjustment, LBWE scored higher than LBWC and similar to NBW on cognitive tests. (BC)

Children at risk for cognitive difficulties were put in two intervention groups, family and day care education and family education alone, and one control group. Children were tested for cognitive performance. The family and day care group scored higher than other groups. No intervention effects were observed for the family education alone group.…