This study attempted to determine: (1) whether lower-order units (agent or agent-action) within the agent-action-recipient relationship exist in any functional way in the 1-word infant's comprehension of speech; and (2) whether the use of repetition and/or reduced length (common modifications in adult-to-infant speech) used to focus on these…

Three-, four- and five-year-old children were presented an array of metamemory tasks designed to test their understanding of variables which affect the difficulty of memory performance. (JMB)

The comprehension of big, little, and same number and the production of relational terminology was assessed in 168 preschool children. (Author/BD)

Four types of semantic relation, assumed by different researchers to be implicated in the organization of semantic information, were investigated by means of false recognition and word association tasks presented to independent samples of 4- and 5-year-old children. (Author/SB)

Kindergarten through fourth graders (N=170) were tested for conservation and then interviewed following the presentation of a story about an elderly woman's death, in an attempt to assess children's understanding of 3 concepts: irrevocability, cessation of bodily processes, and universality. (Author/JMB)

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

This study was designed to determine whether infants could perceive action role reversals when the direction of action is ruled out as a cue; whether infants consider inanimate, nonpotent objects to be unlikely agents; and whether both these discriminations could be reliably reflected in the heart rate response. (Author/SB)

Discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of six studies of the effect of children's expectations on comprehension of the passive transformation and of the Minimum Distance Principle. Study subjects were in kindergarten or elementary school. (Author/MP)

In an attempt to clarify the role of nonlinguistic preferences in children's responses to the words more and less, children 3-4 years of age were administered three tasks. (Author/SB)

Children's ability to infer consequences from sentences automatically was assessed in two cued recall experiments. Seven- and eight-year-old children and adults served as subjects. (JMB)

Presents a developmental study of children's understanding and appreciation of figurative language. Results replicated previous findings that kindergarten children are capable of interpreting figurative language whereas appreciation appears to require increased cognitive sophistication. (JMB)