To ascertain whether reading attitudes changed as boys and girls progressed through the grades, a reading attitude inventory was administered to 234 children in grades one through six. Items in the inventory were grouped into the following categories: free reading in the classroom, organized reading in the classroom, reading at the library,…

To continue the monitoring of reading attitude development begun in an earlier study of 234 children in grades one through six, a second reading attitude inventory was administered in the same school district to 216 primary students and 293 intermediate students. Of particular significance to this study was a change in the basal reading series…

As part of a larger study examining the relation between cognition and emotional understanding, 70 children in kindergarten and third, sixth, and ninth grades were interviewed about four dimensions of emotional understanding: knowledge, control, causality, and multiple feelings. Children were asked about each of these dimensions with regard to…

This study is a preliminary attempt to characterize the development of students' conceptions of education in a comprehensive fashion. The participants were recruited from a middle class suburban school district in Michigan. Seventy students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 12 were interviewed about several issues related to each of the following: (1) the…

Children's visual attention to, and comprehension of, a television program was measured. A total of 64 children, equally distributed by sex, with 32 in kindergarten and 32 in fifth grade, were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions that crossed two levels of content cues with two levels of sound effects. The content cue conditions…

Little is known about very young children's conception of alcoholic beverages and their uses. A study was conducted to determine whether preschool children's ability to correctly access a cognitive network about alcoholic beverages can be related to differences in family exposure to alcohol. Preschoolers (N=57) between the ages of 2.5 and 6 years…

A study examined the connection between the everyday activities of adults of different ages and their performance on a prose recall task. Subjects were 54 adults, 18 in each of three age groups (18-32, 40-54, and over 62). Written recall of two 388-word expository prose passages was used for the prose recall measure. For the activities measures,…

Preschool children, elementary school students, and adults participated in a study that examined various processes used to interpret contradictory communications. A screening test determined that all subjects were capable of discriminating between contradictory and congruent communications. Subjects were presented with contradictory verbal-facial…

A study of children's ability to conserve gender identity was made to: (1) investigate whether constancy would be achieved according to the developmental sequence proposed by Kohlberg (1965) and found in subsequent studies; (2) see if the pattern of conservation of referent-type followed the same sequence found in previous studies; (3) assess age…

Traditional ideals discourage Japanese women from working outside the home. This study was conducted to explore generational differences in Japanese attitudes toward women's employment and to interpret those differences in terms of social change. Questionnaires were distributed to approximately 900 Japanese men and women. Subjects were classified…

Reported are three series of experiments analyzing the development of the visual function of infants. The first experimental series was aimed at the investigation of infants' reaction to moving objects. The second experimental series dealt with the analysis of the development of binocular vision in infants. The goal of the third series was to…

Two studies investigated whether young children acquiring verbs at an exceptional rate can use the syntactic structure of familiar and unfamiliar verbs to make conjectures about some aspect of the meanings of those verbs. The preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 1981) was used to set up a naturalistic pairing of scene and…

The noun phrase of the Norwegian dialect of the multilingual village of Skibotn, in northern Norway, is analyzed. Attention is focused on the possible influence of two other languages, Finnish, an imported language, and Sami, the original language of the area, in the development of three different clusters of features characteristic of nominal…

Differences between metaphors and similes have often been overlooked in the experimental literature, and the comparison theory addressing comprehension of simile may be less appropriate to the more transformational properties of metaphor. It is proposed that one of the variables associated with the difference is affective response, leading to the…

A study of the babbling and phonological development of 54 infants used half-hour videotape recordings of the children at play in their own homes. The vocal output was phonetically transcribed twice for interrater agreement, and analyzed for the consonants used five times or more in the child's vocal repertoire. These consonants were considered to…