Intellectual engagement (IE) refers to enjoyment of intellectual activities and is proposed as causal for knowledge acquisition. The role of IE for cognitive development was examined utilizing 2-year longitudinal data from 112 ninth graders (average baseline age: 14.7 years). Higher baseline IE predicted higher baseline crystallized ability but…

Intellectual (cognitive) development, the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms or levels of understanding, reasoning, and rationality is an ongoing process of reflection, coordination, and social interaction that begins in early childhood and continues, at least in some cases, long into adulthood (Moshman, 2003). In this process, language…

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…

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

The influence of perceptual factors and language comprehension on quantity judgments (number conservation) was assessed in children, aged 2-5. (ST)

Reviews some of the major cognitive, social, and emotional achievements of young children and discusses some of their limitations. Divides description of development into intellectual, language, social, and emotional development. Notes that this division represents adult categories of thought and does not represent young children's actual modes of…

Describes a study showing that mentally retarded children and mentally normal children do not differ fundamentally in cognitive development within the framework of a particular cognitive training. (Text is in French.) (AM)

This article discusses a study designed to determine the order of acquisition of the two expressions "in front of" and "behind," using two featureless objects. (CFM)

"More" and "less" were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, "occurence" and "quantity", which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. (SBT)

Five conference reports that originally appeared as monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development concern cognition in young children. Included in a section on thought are articles on Piaget and his theories, computer simulation on human thinking, and an information processing theory of intellectual development. The development of…

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)

Three investigations of preschool children's comprehension of "younger" and "older" are discussed. Results suggest children focus on height in their initial hypotheses about meanings of the terms, ignoring age or function cues. These and findings about acquisition of antonyms are discussed in terms of recent theorizing about lexical-meaning…

Children's understanding of the nature of polar terms and comparative terms between the polar opposites is discussed. (CHK)