This study examined the relationship between auditory, visual, touch, and oral sensory dysfunction in autism and their relationship to multisensory dysfunction and severity of autism. The Sensory Profile was completed on 104 persons with a diagnosis of autism, 3 to 56 years of age. Analysis showed a significant correlation between the different…

Pictures are often used by cognitive psychologists to investigate the development of cognitive functions. Different attributes of the picture, such as object or picture familiarity, word frequency, and age of acquisition, are known to correlate with naming latency and to affect memory, particularly retrieval processes. But without the use of…

Since E.L. Thorndike's landmark 1917 study of the complexity of reading comprehension, inferential research has generally focused on either inference as a developmental process or the nature of inferences made during reading. In his 1930 study, R. W. Tyler established that inference could be objectively measured. S. G. Paris conducted several…

Resarch on discourse comprehension in adulthood has yielded inconsistent findings. Some studies have reported age-related differences in comprehsnion and recall while others have found no differences between younger and older adults. To examine the recall style of younger and older adults, a narrative was presented to 40 younger (mean age=18.73…

Highlighting pertinent research in the area of young children's development of humor, this paper reviews four areas from a cognitive-developmental perspective: (1) humor as a cognitive process, (2) humor and the developmental process, (3) research on young children's humor, and (4) humor and early childhood education. First, the structural…

The effects of age, sex, and curriculum upon the cognitive performance of 20 college students and 20 college-educated elderly individuals were examined. Young adult participants (M=20.55) and elderly participants (M=67.85) were given a battery of formal operational tasks, a measure of field independence/field dependence, a short-term memory…

This investigation addresses problems of defining verbal imitation, and suggests solutions by analyzing verbal interactions between two children and their mothers. Children were between 18 and 35 months old, with a mean length of utterance between 1.4 and 4.2 morphemes. Analyses focus upon the uses these children made of maternal models; 10…

The hypothesized central role of cognitive development in resolving moral dilemmas was examined in sixth grade and college-age females. Results indicated that sophisticated cognitive operations are a prerequisite to advanced moral judgments. (ST)

Comprehension of metaphor was examined in 36 children ranging in age from 55 months to 186 months. The subjects were audiotaped while answering questions about a target sentence that was contextually anomalous. Five pictures were drawn to accompany each story, two relating to the literal meaning of the target sentence, two to the metaphoric…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

The symbolic representational block constructions of twenty 4-year-olds and twenty 7-year-olds were analyzed from Werner and Kaplan's (1963) theoretical perspective. Each child was read a story and then asked to use the blocks to represent the story. Older children included in their representations a larger number of features that were central to…

A study of the responses made to problems selected from Raven's Progressive Matrices showed differences in the kinds of errors typically made by eighteen-year-old students. Nine problems were used and the 68 subjects were told to draw their answers on the answer sheets. There were two trials per puzzle. A classification system, devised for errors,…

The present study was designed to determine if subjects of different ages are equally distracted by meaningless perceptual and by semantic features of potentially interfering information. In contrast to a Stroop-like task, figures instead of words were used as possibly interfering information. First graders, fourth graders, and college students…