Reading disability (RD) may be characterized by reduced print-speech convergence, which is the extent to which neurocognitive processes for reading and hearing words overlap. We examined how print-speech convergence changes from children (mean age: 11.07±0.48) to adults (mean age: 21.33±1.80) in 86 readers with or without RD. The participants were…

This study examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty-five children aged 9-11 and 25 university students aged 17-29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning…

Teleological reasoning involves the assumption that entities exist for a purpose (giraffes have long necks for reaching leaves). This study examines how teleological reasoning relates to cultural context, by studying teleological reasoning in 61 Quechua-speaking Peruvian preschoolers (M[subscript age] = 5.3 years) and adults in an indigenous…

A crucial skill in scientific and everyday reasoning is the ability to interpret data. The present study examined how data features influence data interpretation. In Experiment 1, one hundred and thirty-three 9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and college students (mean age = 20 years) were shown a series of data sets that varied in the number of…

Seeks to demonstrate that age differences in the interpretation of moral judgment stimulus stories can reliably predict differences in patterns of moral evaluations. Also attempts to characterize the nature of these age-related interpretation differences. Stimulus stories represented each of Heider's levels of responsibility and varied in outcome…

Examines the relationship between the ease with which a picture is interpreted and the structural similarity between the picture and the subject it represents. Preschoolers, first graders, sixth graders, and college students participated in the study. (CW)

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Investigates the asserted differences in reasoning between adults and second, fourth, and sixth graders in a manipulation of variables task using class inclusion and story problems with common everyday situations. Results are discussed in terms of sensible reasoning and problem-solving skills. (CM)

Tests the effects of stimulus variability on overgeneralization and overdiscrimination errors in children and adults. The subjects (n=64), adults and five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children, participated in a visual discrimination task. (CM)

Finds that, after being exposed to many isolation-of-variables assessment problems, most college subjects made immediate and substantial gains in formal reasoning, while preadolescents made gradual, modest gains. (RH)

The question of whether or not a certain mathematical model is applicable to the paired-associate data of preschool children as well as adults was examined in five experiments. (Author/MP)

Students in grades two, four, six, and college sorted abstract visual patterns that varied both in amount of contour and in type of visual organization (unstructured, simple symmetries, multiple symmetries, and rotational). Results suggested that children attend to both amount of contour and visual organization, but that attention to visual…

Second graders, sixth graders, and college students served in two experiments designed to assess (1) the selection and use of landmarks during route learning and (2) the coordination of successive environmental experiences into an overall configuration. (Author/RH)

Employed a series of sorting tasks with 80 subjects (7-20 years old) to determine whether children and adolescents make a conceptual distinction between events defined as personal matters and issues of morality or social convention. (Author/MP)