This study examined the ability of 4-year-old children to understand the propositional components (presuppositions and assertions) of semantically complex propositions and to deduce what such components together imply. (BRT)

A sample of 79 children from 5 to 8 years of age were observed for a 6-week period while they attended summer camp. Their inferential ability was assessed by asking each child to interpret a series of videotaped social episodes which were then related to their observed assertive and prosocial behaviors. (Author/JMB)

The category item production task was used to obtain child norms and to investigate two alternative types of category bias reputedly shown by young children: (a) underinclusion of appropriate items; and (b) overinclusion of inappropriate items. Preschool and grade school children (n=144) were asked to produce verbal responses to four category…

The social cognitive performance of aggressive and nonaggressive children was assessed under conditions of relaxation and threat. Aspects assessed included skillfulness, bias, and process. Subjects were 65 aggressive and nonaggressive boys 8- to 10-years-old. Findings were interpreted as consistent with theories of preemptive processing and…

The hypothesis that, when trying to decide whether the person, stimulus, or circumstance is the cause of an event, individuals increasingly select schema-consistent information with increasing age was tested in 106 Turkish 9-, 12-, and 17-year-old subjects. (Author/RH)

Early developmental changes in children's understanding of causality were examined in two studies of three and five year olds' causal judgments. In both studies, children were asked to judge which of two stimuli caused an observed event across a series of problems providing a variety of alternative cues. (Author)

Twenty-seven 4-month-old infants heard a repetitive auditory rhythm, then viewed silent film of puppet opening/closing its mouth, either in the familiar rhythm or a novel rhythm. Results showed infants exposed to the novel condition watched the film longer than infants shown the familiar condition, providing evidence for auditory-visual transfer…

A total of 120 children between four to eight years of age were administered four sets of visual perspective-taking tasks. Results supported the hypothesis that children's task competence would be a fraction of the number and type of spatial relationships embedded in the stimulus displays. (Author/MP)

Investigates the effect of the relationship between conditions at encoding (familiarization) and retrieval (test) with regard to infants' performance on a paired-comparison recognition test. Subjects were 32 male and 32 female infants between 8.7 and 10.3 months of age. (MP)

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Third- and fifth-grade children's abilities to make inferences in the context of reading and understanding a lengthy story were examined. The most critical result was that the younger, but not the older children, made fewer inferences when the component premises for an inference were located in separate paragraphs than when they occurred in the…

When presented visual patterns for 100-msec followed by a 100-msec patterned masker at intervals of 0, 250, 500, and 2,000 msec after the offset of the stimulus, only infants in the 2,000-msec stimulus-masker interval condition significantly fixated a novel stimulus longer than a familiar stimulus. Results suggest visual processing in infants is…

Newborn infants' fixation of a graduated series of visual stimuli significantly differed in the absence and presence of white-noise bursts. Relative to the no-sound condition, sound resulted in the infants' tendency to look more at the low-intensity visual stimulus and less at the high- intensity visual stimulus. (Author/DB)

Nine experimental conditions were partitioned into three experimental designs. A total of 576 children, drawn in equal numbers from kindergarten, second, fourth and sixth grades, memorized a 32-pair list of common nouns by the study-test recognition procedure. Among the results, in the storage phase of task performance an increasing superiority of…

Two tasks were used to evaluate the relationship between concept usage and the organization of knowledge in semantic memory for 7-, 11-, 15-, and 18-year-old subjects. (JMB)