Several challenges arise when researchers or practitioners attempt to assess the literacy skills of toddlers, including a lack of developmentally appropriate measures, toddlers' more limited communication ability, and how literacy is defined in the years before age three. This paper describes four new measures of early literacy development and…

American students typically attend kindergarten at the chronological age (CA) of five and currently with the implementation of Common Core State Standards, there are expectations that children learn how to read in order to meet these academic standards, despite whether or not they are developmentally ready. This mixed methods study examined age…

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

According to Piaget, young children have a profoundly different conception of distance than do adults. In fact, Piaget argues that young children do not have a conception of distance since they do not conceive of distance as being composed of fixed units of space. In contrast, results of a series of studies indicate that in tasks requiring…

Infants 8.5 and 9.5 months of age were tested for ability to determine the location of an object hidden in one of two covered containers before their left-right positions were reversed. Only the older infants provided with different colored covers to their containers were able to do this task. (Author/DB)

Two experiments examining adults' use of dimensional adjectives focused specifically on the distinction made between height and overall size as determiners of "bigness." The subjects in both experiments were college students. In the first, the hypothesis that the meaning of "big" shifts as a function of the object being…