This article discusses newer views of functional developmental plasticity occurring after biological insults to the developing central nervous system (CNS), including concepts of neurobehavioral outcome and ways to measure it, biological risk, age and development at onset of CNS insult, time since onset of CNS insult, and reserve. (Contains…

Examined effects of divorce and custody arrangements on Taiwanese preschoolers' emotional adjustment and gender role development 2 years after divorce. Found no differences in maladjustment of children from divorced versus two-parent families. Found children with same-sex custodial parents were better adjusted than children in custody with…

Three experiments examined kindergartners' and second graders' retention in the context of two distinctiveness manipulations, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Results showed that: older children retained more information from lists of pictures or interactive images over 3 weeks than younger; younger children failed to benefit from…

A study examined the traumatic events and behavior symptoms of 46 unaccompanied refugee minors waiting for placement in an asylum center in Finland. The children had experienced numerous losses, separations, persecution, and threats. About half were functioning within clinical or borderline range. Younger children had more severe psychiatric…

Maintains that the "getting into shape" hypothesis of explaining the inverted-U distribution of exercise play across age is likely incorrect. Argues that the biological study of human physical activity play, as recommended by Pellegrini and Smith (1998), will reveal whether physical activity play represents an example of…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

Studied empirical factors related to achievement in educational research courses using a sample of 121 graduate students. Students with the lowest achievement tended to have or exhibit at least one of these characteristics: younger age, lower overall achievement, higher levels of research anxiety, higher statistics anxiety, poorer study habits,…

Three experiments explored 5- and 7-month-olds' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive information produced by leg movements and visual movement information specifying these same motions. Results suggested that coordination of visual and proprioceptive inputs is constrained by infants' information processing of the displays and have…

Two experiments tracked infants' eye movements to examine use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. Results indicated that 21- and 18-month-olds recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as whole words. Infants' productive vocabulary and reaction time were related to word recognition accuracy. Results show that…

Examined whether new mothers would gain knowledge of child development after participating in a home visitation program for six months, and whether there would be differences between adolescent mothers and older mothers. Results indicated an overall increase in total knowledge of child development for mothers (of all ages) participating in a home…

A 3-year study explored the development of the complexity of block constructions of 65 preschool children. Results indicated that the complexity of block constructions increased with age, the time the child was involved with block construction activities had a positive effect on complexity, and gender did not influence block construction…

This investigation examined the comprehension skills of 63 urban African-American children (ages 4-6) from middle-income homes. Performances on a task designed to elicit responses to wh-questions and another to make distinctions between active and passive sentence constructions revealed grade effects and a positive relationship to age. (Author/CR)

Investigated the effects of playing violent versus non-violent video games on the interpretation of ambiguous provocation situation. Found that children playing a violent video game responded more negatively to three of six ambiguous provocation story questions than children playing the non-violent video game. Data suggest that playing violent…

Presents evidence from studies on adults' language processing and children's language acquisition that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several levels of representation. Proposes that phonological acquisition might provide the bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. Concludes that age-appropriate…

Examined patterns in the relative risk of course failure and recovery from failure over the first four semesters of high school for students in the Chicago, Illinois, school system, showing how failure rates vary as a function of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and prior performance. Results for 27,612 students show that few recover from failure,…