Using an elicited imitation paradigm, we investigated whether young children imitate the communicative intentions behind speech. Previous research using elicited imitation has shown that children tend to correct ungrammatical sentences. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence that children, like adults, remember and reproduce the gist of…

Tested 6- and 8-year olds' ability to construct irony in story-completion tasks. Found that story stems based on familiar events, for which structured, detailed representations are available, facilitated irony more than did less-familiar activities, supporting irony as a metarepresentational skill. Young children's irony manipulated cognitively…

The basis of young children's performance of judgments of recency and frequency was investigated using a modified version of Huppert and Piercy's [Huppert, F. A., & Piercy, M. (1978). The role of trace strength in recency and frequency judgements by amnesic and control subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 30, 347-354]…

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

Compared the use of conditional logic in adult-adult and adult-child conversation. Results indicated that conversation patterns and inferences were similar except that children made fewer independent inferences and shifts in taxonomic level and responded more frequently to socially controlling statements than did adults. (AA)