Three experiments examined how flexibly two- to four-year-old children use the words "big" and "little" in normative, perceptual, and functional contexts. Results showed that children switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. (MDM)

Some researchers have attributed school learning problems to students entering school too early. Investigated relationship between students' month of birth and learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, and speech and language delays in 1,951 identified students with these disabilities. Analysis did not find that late-birthdate children were…

The addition of idiosyncratic features to individual members of an artificially constructed category enhanced specific item memory among 13 month olds, but not among 10 month olds. Discussion of findings focuses on their theoretical implications and the nature of the age difference. (RH)

Maintains that Madole and Oakes' hypotheses are incorrect. Shows that conceptual development frequently goes from the abstract to the concrete and that extensive literature shows that there is more than one kind of categorization. Discusses ways in which perceptual and conceptual categorization differ. (Author/KB)

Three studies examined the emergence of attention to gender categories in toddlers. Results suggested that 18-month-olds showed little attention to gender on a sequential touching task. The possibility that they could not discriminate the dolls used in the task by gender was ruled out. There was a sharp increase in attention to gender between 18…

This is the 32nd Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 2010. Section 664(d) of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (P.L. 108-446), as reauthorized in 2004, requires that the Department of Education report annually on the progress made toward the provision of a free…

Investigated two developmental implications: (1) that foci for color categories become established and stabilized earlier than boundaries, and (2) that focal judgments are always more stable than boundary judgments. Subjects were 20 kindergarteners, 40 third graders and 40 adults. (Author/SDH)

A classification task with two experimental conditions, a visual presentation mode and a verbal presentation mode, was presented to 20 adult subjects and to 108 children, ages 3 years, 9 months to 7 years, 2 months. Among children, verbal presentation elicited a significantly greater number of accurate functional classifications than did the…

Developmental differences in categorization in a communication situation were investigated among 16 adult women and 16 nine-year-old children who instructed 7-year-old children in either the organization of groceries in a mock kitchen (home task) or the sorting of photographs of common objects into compartments (school task). In both tasks, the 18…

This study was designed to examine the processes underlying developmental changes in children's (1) use of combinatorial strategy, and (2) comprehension of conjunctive and disjunctive propositional relationships. A total of 108 children from third, sixth and eighth grades participated in this study. Each child was administered three tasks…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the development of evaluative and taxonomic encoding in children's memory. The task used was a modification of the Wickens short-term memory task in which subjects' recall of words is tested following a distraction task. The first experiment found that 11-year-old children, but not 8-year-old children,…

This paper describes studies which investigated the nature of the relationship between number of categories and recall performance in children, and attempted to determine whether the category-recall effect increases developmentally. A series of three studies was designed so that grade level and stimulus difficulty would not be confounded.…

This study examined the performance of middle aged and elderly adults on the Piagetian tests of class inclusion and multiple classification. (GO)

Investigates three alternative explanations for why younger children benefit more than older children from the provision of category size information when recalling items from a categorized list. Subjects were 29 kindergarten and 30 third grade children. (MP)

Development of the relation between skills of visual and auditory pattern classification was studied at the second grade, sixth grade, and adult age levels using visual and auditory representations of the same abstract information. Results showed evidence of common processing of pattern class structure for the modalities, patterns, prototypes, and…