Infants were able to discriminate between bah" and gah" syllables, indicating that linguistic-perceptual capacities are present during early life. (WY)

There were significant differences among the groups (articulation disordered five-year-olds) classified as syllable reducers or substituters and normal children on several imitative expressive language measures, with the syllable reducers making both deletion and substitution errors and the substituters making substitution errors for functors.…

The authors discuss modality strengths, perceptual channels which are most effective to an individual's learning, particularly as they relate to the education of gifted children. (SB)

Measures of concrete operational thought and the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices were factor analyzed for a sample of primary students. Results indicated that primarily perceptual abilities are required for solution of the Piagetian tests, although abstract reasoning is involved in the solution of matrices and in conservation of substance…

Examined reasons why young children typically omit the torso in human figure drawings. Found that more children produced a conventional figure when they constructed a manikin than when they were asked to draw, suggesting that children omit torsos because they have not yet devised a way of drawing them, rather than forgetting them or having an…

Investigates the concept of animacy of 9- and 12-month-old infants by exposing them to autonomous motion with animate and inanimate objects in a series of three experiments. Three experiments were carried out. Results indicated that infants discriminate animate from inanimate objects on the basis of motion cues by the age of nine months. (MOK)

Two studies investigated how 5- to 10-year-olds integrate perceptual causality with their knowledge of the underlying causal mechanism, using two devices in which a bell would ring when a ball was dropped in, either immediately or after a delay, depending on the mechanism inside. Findings suggest a link between temporal contiguity and causality in…

Visual preference procedures were used to investigate development of perceptually based subordinate-level categorization in 3- to 7-month-old infants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that 3- to 4-month-olds did not form category representations for photographic exemplars of subordinate-level classes of cats and dogs (i.e., Siamese vs. Tabby,…

A study tested the possibility that children 16-24 months old and 6-7 years old can code distance without the use of landmarks. Younger children sat with their mothers at the side of a sandbox and watched the experimenter hide a toy in the sand. After being distracted, the children looked for the toy in the box. Nine trials were used, with toys…

Two studies investigating figurative expectancy, or the tendency to make perceptual judgments on the basis of temporal patterns, are reported. The results are interpreted as supportive of Piaget's theory of perceptual development. (JMB)