At preschool age, it is generally accepted that children's main pursuit is play. In particular, pretend play has a major role in supporting a preschooler's learning processes. Early pretend play involves object substitution, before later progressing to the incorporation of invisible objects. The purpose of the presented study was to validate that…

The current media are laden with reports of the many significant problems facing today's youth. In fact, parenting has become a national topic of discussion. Parenting instruction, a responsibility that had previously rested in the home, has become part of educational curricula. Courses in child development are offered for high school students in…

We evaluated over 200 participants semiannually from 12 to 48 months of age on measures of intellectual (Bayley Scales, Stanford-Binet Scale) and verbal (MacArthur-Bates Inventory, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) status. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear (growth curve) analyses were applied to address the nature of development…

A total of 28 children were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results supported a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension. (Author/LLK)

Examines whether the use of weight or linear array comparisons provide a contextual cue which facilitates the comprehension of the comparative terms "more" and "less". (Author/ED)

This study of the understanding of the words "and" and "or" in children, ages 2-7 1/2, indicates that "and" is used to express enumeration, and "or" to express alternatives, and that most children's responses are correct at age 4 and beyond. Differences between the linguistic and logical meaning of connection are discussed. (Author/LLK)

A retrospective check of 100, white 4-year-olds (with IQ's of 140 or more) showed no precocity at age 8 months, as measured by the Bayley Scales of Mental and Motor Development. (ST)

Reports two experiments to assess the usefulness of an alternative position to the "deficit hypothesis" and the "differences hypothesis," namely, that environmental/situational factors attenuate the performance of lower-class children, but that their competence, while genotypically equivalent to that of middle-class children,…

In an investigation of comprehension strategies in young children, children in R. Brown's Stages I, II, and III responded to commands varying in length, grammaticality, and meaning. (SB)

Tested the comprehension of 3- and 4-year-old children with probable and improbable sentences in active and passive voice in order to evaluate the importance of semantic support for comprehension of passive sentences. (Author/SDH)

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)