In two experiments, we investigated whether 4- to 5-year-old children's ability to demonstrate their understanding of aspectuality was influenced by how the test question was phrased. In Experiment 1, 60 children chose whether to look or feel to gain information about a hidden object (identifiable by sight or touch). Test questions referred either…

Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds performed Tower of London problems under spoken, manual, and combined (requiring both spoken and manual) response conditions. Preschoolers' solutions were most goal-focused when required to give only a spoken response, intermediately goal-focused when required to give both response types, and least goal-focused when…

This paper draws on an ESRC-funded study (Payler, 2005) of the sociocultural influences on learning processes of 10 four-year-old children in their second year of the Foundation Stage in England (DfEE, 2000). The children, very close in age, were in one of two early years settings: a pre-school playgroup with a largely invisible pedagogy…