Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M[subscript age] = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders…

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with…

This study examined the contribution of executive function (EF) and multiple aspects of fine motor skills to achievement on 6 standardized assessments in a sample of middle-socioeconomic status kindergarteners. Three- and 4-year-olds' (n = 213) fine and gross motor skills were assessed in a home visit before kindergarten, EF was measured at fall…

A test of advanced theory of mind (ToM), first introduced by F. Happe (1994), was adapted for children (mental, human, animal, and nature stories plus unlinked sentences). These materials were closely matched for difficulty and were presented to forty-five 7- to 12-year-olds with autism and 27 control children. Children with autism who showed ToM…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Describes two studies designed to determine how children in first through third grades become aware of their failure to comprehend instructions. Results suggested that children's initial insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is due to a relative lack of constructive processing. (JMB)

Results of three studies suggest that, to notice inconsistencies in prose, children have to encode and store information, draw relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain inferred propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out. (JMB)

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Third- and fifth-grade children's abilities to make inferences in the context of reading and understanding a lengthy story were examined. The most critical result was that the younger, but not the older children, made fewer inferences when the component premises for an inference were located in separate paragraphs than when they occurred in the…

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief…

Investigates children's knowledge of the role of message quality in referential communication and their ability to evaluate the accuracy of a listener's feedback about his/her comprehension. Children evaluated a puppet listener's comprehension after they had given complete or inadequate directions and received his report that he did or did not…

In three studies, children between five and ten years of age listened to short stories and answered questions about presented and implied information. Results demonstrated how hypothesis generation, comprehension monitoring, clue integration, and converging evidence influence children's developing inferential reasoning. (Author/MP)

Presents two experiments which measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to assess semantic processing. Results suggest that picture-word interference is partly semantically based and that children and adults experience an equivalent amount of semantic interference. (Author/SDH)