Objective: Our objective was to evaluate the efficacy of the Sitting Together and Reaching to Play (START-Play) intervention in young infants with neuromotor disorders. Method: This randomized controlled trial compared usual care-early intervention (UC-EI) with START-Play plus UC-EI. Analyses included 112 infants with motor delay (55 UC-EI, 57…

Cognition, faculty related to perception, imagination, memory, and problem solving, refers to internal mental processes through which sensorial input is acquired, elaborated, used, and stored. One of its importances relies on the fact that it affects in a direct way the learning potential. It has been shown that, even thou cognitive processes…

Using a sample of resident fathers in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (9-month Father Study), this study examined how father involvement is associated with infant cognitive outcomes in two domains (babbling and exploring objects with a purpose). Results from a series of logistic regression models indicate that varied aspects of…

Three theories of deafness and cognition are summarized, and the problem of deaf children's lagging cognitive development in concrete nonverbal logical problems is considered. It is suggested that this delay may be caused by the difficulty hearing people have communicating to the deaf, and educational implications of this speculation are noted.…

Article reviews Piaget's views on language and explains why he is not more concerned with this than he is. (AM)

Hypothesized that cognitively complex individuals would be more effective than cognitively simple individuals at accomplishing a communication-dependent task. Analysis revealed that messages (generated by an exercise with tinker toy models and a password game) of complex individuals were more effective than the messages of comparatively simple…

Focusing on the process by which intentions get expressed in written form, this article presents a theory of communicative competence based on the development of the "part-whole" thinking process. Specific topics discussed in the article are: speech act theory; speech act theory and theories stressing the importance of subject cognition; genetic…

This collection of conference abstracts focuses on new directions for research on mental representation and early language development. One page summaries are provided on the following topics: Mental Representation and Initial Language Learning, by Lorraine M. Nicolich; Critical Issues in Language and Cognitive Development, by Roberta Corrigan;…

A study was conducted in light of a neo-Piagetian theory of cognitive development to interpret the effect of priming executive schemes for describing relevant features in a referential communication task. Forty-eight 4-year-old children were divided into primed and nonprimed groups and were asked to describe in isolation a black and white…

This paper probes the implications for psychology of recent advances in the study of young children's acquisition of communication skills. The inadequacy of traditional ways of thinking about cognitive and social development as a base for developmental psycholinguistics is discussed and the lack of attention to the basic cognitive schemes which…

Piaget's ideas are discussed: that the basic thrust of education is determined by the intellectual development of the child, that the child's intelligence develops in definite stages, and that the goal of the developmental process is to reason in logical terms. (MLW)

Forty-eight nursery school and kindergarten children participated in a study of concept learning. The study focused on children's use of intensional and extensional information in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. The intension of a concept is its definition or set of defining attributes; its extension is the set of all…

This paper reviews nine studies which report conflicting results in assessing the relationship between children's role-taking ability and communication skills. The studies included satisfy three criteria: (1) role-taking and communication efficiency are measured independently; (2) tasks used to measure the two skills are significantly different in…

Once speech educators turn their attention to the "ideational" function of oral language--that portion pertaining to thinking--rather than the relational function, they will see that speech can and should be incorporated into every discipline. The psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky envisions the ways in which humans use speech to reorder their…

In the light of significant changes in contemporary society that demand high level thinking skills of professional workers, this monograph explores the nature of independent thinking and principles of teaching independent thinking, particularly to college freshmen. A section on independent thinking outlines abstract, creative, and systematic…