In this study, the development of comprehension of essential and nonessential aspects of counting is examined in children ranging from 5 to 8 years of age. Essential aspects, such as logical rules, and nonessential aspects, including conventional rules, were studied. To address this, we created a computer program in which children watched counting…

Although labeling improves executive function (EF) performance in children older than 3 years, the results from studies with younger children have been equivocal. In the current study, we assessed performance in a computerized multistep multilocation search task with older 2-year-olds. The correct search location was either (a) not marked by a…

The lexical decision task is probably the most common laboratory visual word identification task together with the naming task. In the usual setup, participants need to press the "yes" button when the stimulus is a word and the "no" button when the stimulus is not a word. A number of studies have employed this task with developing readers;…

The current experiments examined the role of scale factor in children's proportional reasoning. Experiment 1 used a choice task and Experiment 2 used a production task to examine the abilities of kindergartners through fourth-graders to match equivalent, visually depicted proportional relations. The findings of both experiments show that accuracy…

Evidence that young children often claim ownership of their partner's contributions to an earlier collaborative activity, the "appropriation bias", has been attributed to shared intentionality ("Cognitive Development" (1998) 13, 91-108). The current investigation explored this notion by examining individual differences in the bias among 4- and…

Learning about letters is an important foundation for literacy development. Should children be taught to label letters by conventional names, such as /bi/ for "b", or by sounds, such as /b[inverted e]/? We queried parents and teachers, finding that those in the United States stress letter names with young children, whereas those in…

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of individual differences in working memory capacity on number transcoding. A recently proposed model, ADAPT (a developmental asemantic procedural transcoding model), accounts for the development of number transcoding from verbal form to Arabic form by two mechanisms: the learning of new production rules…

Used picture-naming task to identify accurate/inaccurate phonological representations by dyslexic and control children; compared performance on phonological measures for words with precise/imprecise representations. Found that frequency effects in phonological tasks disappeared after considering representational quality, and that availability of…

Three experiments examined 3- to 4-year olds' judgments about physical representations which no longer matched their references. Results showed that children tended to misidentify the name of a sticker in a written list to match a change to its referent. Children's incorrect judgments indicated that realist errors to external representations…

Three experiments examined limitations in 5-year-olds' understanding of mental and linguistic representations. Findings indicated relatively poor performance on task involving two labels for one object, requiring children to treat another's knowledge as representing only some feature of its real referent: dice but not eraser. There were parallel…

Researchers found that children who were lexical readers (those who read words as units) tended to make more errors involving partial lexical information when spelling irregular words than those who were sublexical readers (those who translated letters into sounds when reading). Sublexical readers tended to spell non-words better and to make more…

First, second, and fourth graders listened to stories containing an inconsistent goal and outcome. Children provided a causal inference for the inconsistency, and attributed the inference to themselves or the story. Children's attributions were related to whether the story contained causal information linking the inconsistent events. (BC)

We explored how relational complexity and featural distraction, as varied in scene analogy problems, affect children's analogical reasoning performance. Results with 3- and 4-year-olds, 6- and 7-year-olds, 9- to 11-year-olds, and 13- and 14-year-olds indicate that when children can identify the critical structural relations in a scene analogy…

Explored effects of naturally-occurring peer interactions and repeated suggestive interviews on preschoolers' event memories. Found that suggestive interviews, combined with peer exposure, led to children's claims of witnessing target activities comparable to those of children who actually witnessed these activities. Assent rates for misleading…

Investigated the relative effects of developmental level and domain-specific knowledge on 4- to 9-year-olds' ability to identify and make similarity decisions about objects based on haptic or tactile information. Found that older children explored models more exhaustively, found more differentiating features, and made fewer errors than younger…