The study investigated the relationship between characteristics of 35 preschool handicapped children and their developmental gains in an early intervention program. The specific characteristics that were examined included age at intervention, length of intervention, socioeconomic status, first born as compared to all other ordinal positions in…

Piaget's egocentrism and Witkin's psychological differentiation are important constructs in theories of cognitive development. A comparison of these concepts could lead to an increased understanding of cognitive development in the older adult. In a test of Witkin's revised model of psychological differentiation, the Portable Rod and Frame Test…

The development of the concept of God was assessed among 120 children between the ages of 5 to 16 years who attended private Protestant and Catholic day schools in the San Diego area. All children participated in a semi-clinical interview. Twelve interview questions were asked as the first step of a probing technique used to initiate a dialogue…

Comprehension of metaphor was examined in 36 children ranging in age from 55 months to 186 months. The subjects were audiotaped while answering questions about a target sentence that was contextually anomalous. Five pictures were drawn to accompany each story, two relating to the literal meaning of the target sentence, two to the metaphoric…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

The support of friends and religious groups is a critical factor in the ability of parents to adjust to the death of a child. Two groups (N=19 each) of bereaved parents completed a questionnaire to assess their grief reactions. The results found that parents took an average of 11 months to return to an approximate level of personal happiness…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

This study explored the relationship between children's sense of justice for a criminal offender and their cognitive level. Subjects were 60 children, 10 boys and 10 girls at each of the following developmental or cognitive levels: preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Each child was individually pretested for cognitive…

This study, which indicates that both age and variation in training affect children's concept formation, provides a basis for explaining the effect of age. Sixty-four 4- and 5-year-olds learned three novel concepts (animal-like, plant-like, and machine-like). Subjects were presented with either four different examples of each concept (multiple…

The symbolic representational block constructions of twenty 4-year-olds and twenty 7-year-olds were analyzed from Werner and Kaplan's (1963) theoretical perspective. Each child was read a story and then asked to use the blocks to represent the story. Older children included in their representations a larger number of features that were central to…

This study investigated effects of response feedback and presentation of a goal-contingency on preschool children's delay time and work productivity in a voluntary delay-of-gratification paradigm. Subjects were 64 middle class preschool children (32 boys and 32 girls). The children's ages ranged from 3.6 years to 5.7 years. In the goal-contingency…

In order to refine further the process of measuring self-perceptions, nine different self-scales of the Affective Perception Inventory (API)--descriptive of academic settings--were administered to students in grades one through twelve, their peers, and their teachers. Within a multitrait-multimethod formulation, the scores yielded high internal…

Elementary school students were required to obtain objects from two adults engaged in conversation with each other. Results differed markedly between older and younger children. For the younger children, (1) there were three times as many statement requests (SRs) as interrogative requests (IRs); (2) almost 50% of requests were need statements; (3)…

Misconceptions regarding sickle cell disease are qualitatively different among latency age patients as compared to adolescents. The evolution and resolution of these misconceptions determine the effectiveness of self-help programs for sickle cell patients. The Mount Sinai Hospital Sickle Cell Counseling Service is a coordinated center for sickle…