The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

The ability to read is essential for cognitive development. To deepen our understanding of reading acquisition, we explored the neuroanatomical correlates (cortical thickness; CT) of word-reading fluency and sentence comprehension efficiency in Chinese with a group of typically developing children (N = 21; 12 females and 9 males; age range…

Reconsiders the predominant views on the acquisition of kinship terms. Topics discussed include: (1) kinship and the ontogenesis of logic; (2) kinship and semantic development; (3) the language learner as naive theorist; (4) development and domain specificity; and (5) an alternative approach to kinship. (RJC)

Transcribed the speech of 3 African-American mothers and their 19- to 27-month-old children over a 9-month period. Compared to the language of Euro-American children described in earlier studies, the language of these African-American children developed similarly in length and semantic-syntactic relations but included more talk about needs, wants,…

With reference to Chinese language and its unique orthography, evidence for language-related differences in manners of information processing is reviewed. These differences include visual form perception, manipulation of numbers, and memory versus manipulation and elaboration of verbal information. (Author/RH)

Deals with knowledge of scalar transformations among Brazilian students and construction foremen. Compares students' mathematical experience to foremen's. Reports study on students' and foremen's performance in solving scale drawing problems. Discusses aspects of relationship between learning mathematical procedures in school and daily life and…

Sorting of animal terms and ratings of animal pair dissimilarities yielded a dominant dimension of size for grades seven, eleven, and undergraduate groups. The dominant dimension for zoologists, however, was based on food habits. Implications are discussed. (Author/RH)

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

We investigated the nature of graphic formulas in 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children when they were asked to draw a house and a television in a free condition, and then to draw from photographs of these objects. Assuming that the frequency of occurrence of a feature in children's drawings reflects its semantic weight, we studied the relations between…