Research Findings: This study examined the learning effects of collaborative group work under heterogeneous group composition among 5-year-old children, especially in terms of their social skills. To this end, the study utilized an experimental research design wherein 3 groups of differently composed dyads and a group of students who worked alone…

Errors differ in degree of seriousness. We asked whether preschoolers would use the magnitude of an informant's errors to decide if that informant would be a good source of information later. Four- and 5-year-olds observed two informants incorrectly label familiar objects, but one informant's errors were closer to the correct answer than the…

Studies of communication in early infancy and childhood have highlighted the significance of rhythm, sound and music for emotional and social development. There is, however, little detailed empirical data on the emergence of naturalistic music-related behaviour by children in the early years. The aim of this work is to examine instances of…

The transition into school occurs at the intersection of multiple environmental settings. This study applied growth curve modeling to a sample of 1,364 American children, followed from birth through age 6, who had been categorized by their exposure to cognitive stimulation at home and in preschool child care and 1st-grade classrooms. Of special…

Three studies investigated whether children, ages 2-7, recognized facial expressions by category. Study 1 focused on emotion categories of happiness and anger; Study 2, on sex differences, with sadness added. Study 3 was on 2- and 3-year-olds. All three studies showed a Label Superiority Effect, in which emotion labels resulted in more accurate…

Three experiments examine how preschoolers partition their basic level categories to form subordinate level categories and whether these have inductive potential. Results suggest that contrastive information promotes the emergence of subordinate categories as a basis of inductive inference and newly established subordinate categories can retain…

Six studies, with 174 three-year-olds in California, investigated whether children's knowledge of a label for an object excluded the possibility that they would accept another label for the object. Results indicate that mutual exclusivity motivates children to learn terms for attributes, substances, parts, and objects. (TJH)

Compared 40 3-year-olds' superordinate level classification under 2 experimental conditions. Although there was no mean difference between the 2 conditions, there were striking differences in the distribution of scores. (RJC)

Three studies examined preschool children's understanding of categorical hierarchies, testing their ability to form categories at different levels of generality and to include the same objects in multiple categories. Found that, contrary to the implications of previous studies, two- and three-year olds appear to have both categorization skills.…

Used classification and seriation games over 4 months to teach the oddity principle and insertion into a series to Head Start 4-year-olds during free play. A comparison group participated in free play without the teacher-directed classification and seriation games. At the conclusion, intervention students were significantly better than comparison…

Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (N3C) principle by 22 toddlers with Down syndrome was studied. Results indicated that the ability to fast map a new word to a category is not available at the start of lexical acquisition. Children who used the N3C principle had larger productive vocabularies than others and had begun to acquire new…

Three tests were conducted to contrast the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to label and relabel objects. The findings show that bilingual subjects were significantly better than monolingual subjects, supporting the view that preschool bilingual education stimulates children's cognitive development, and enhances their self-concept.…

Five experiments examined matching to sample procedures among preschoolers. Results indicated that children selected taxonomic comparisons more often than thematic comparisons, independent of age, gender, instructions, order of trial type, specificity of feedback, presence of unrelated third comparisons, and level of taxonomy. Instructions to…

Discussed are results of studies of the cognitive development of 2- and 3-year-old children which suggest that the mind makes gains in the ability to think as gains in language development are made. "Thinking" in this context refers to the judgments children made as they selected objects and maneuvered them into one arrangement or…

This study examined the effectiveness of the Early Childhood Curriculum (ECC) as a viable instrument for the immediate acceleration of cognitive development among preschoolers. During an eight month tutorial project, ten 3-year-old children received one 15 minute lesson each week from the curriculum. (Author/SB)