This collection of conference abstracts focuses on new directions for research on mental representation and early language development. One page summaries are provided on the following topics: Mental Representation and Initial Language Learning, by Lorraine M. Nicolich; Critical Issues in Language and Cognitive Development, by Roberta Corrigan;…

Strategies used by 150 children as they solved addition and subtraction verbal problems were studied over a period of one-and-a-half years. Number size and presence of manipulative materials were variables manipulated in individual interviews given at three separate intervals. Two addition and four subtraction tasks were used. Processes changed…

Jean Piaget's theory seems to lend support to reading specialists who believe that concrete operational thought constitutes a necessary and sufficient condition for learning to read. Preoperational children cannot deal with the complex relationships inherent in reading because they are tied perceptually to the immediate situation or…

THE MAJOR PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO DEVELOP A COGNITIVE TRAINING PROGRAM DESIGNED TO INCREASE MENTALLY RETARDED AND NORMAL SUBJECTS' PERFORMANCES ON FLEXIBILITY-TYPE TASKS AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE TESTS. A TEST BATTERY OF FIVE TESTS (STENCIL DESIGN, EMBEDDED FIGURES, PICTURE ANOMALIES, OBJECT SORTING, AND TELL ABOUT THIS), DESIGNED TO MEASURE…

From about age four to age eleven, a child's concept of "word" develops from a lack of conceptual differentiation about things and events to an awareness of words as meaningful elements in themselves. Piaget's theory of cognitive development offers a perspective from which this phenomenon can be evaluated. The preoperational and concrete…

Four males and four females from each of grades one through six served as subjects in an investigation of the development of recursive thought (imagining other people's thoughts). One half of the subjects were asked to tell what a little boy in a picture was thinking about various configurations of faces. The remaining subjects were told the…

This paper is a technical report of analyses carried out to determine the effects of parents' involvement in a prekindergarten program on their children's cognitive development. The research was part of a longitudinal study of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program. A multiple linear regression approach was used to test hypotheses…

As part of a longitudinal study of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program, the effect of degree of parental involvement in the program on children's cognitive development was examined. Parent involvement included employment in the program, school visits, home visits by school personnel, group meetings, and incidental contacts such…

A sequence of reasoning processes based on a combination of theories developed by Jean Piaget is presented. An applied theory of concept-teaching is derived from the restructuring of Piagetian theories on logical thought specifically concerned with the notions of the additive and multiplicative ordering of groups, and the four logic processes of…

This experiment investigated the effect of children's successive encounters with a large scale environment on their subsequent reconstructions of that environment. Twenty children (10 boys, 10 girls) at each of three grade levels (kindergarten, two, and five) reconstructed from memory the spatial layout of buildings in a large model town. All…

A study was conducted in light of a neo-Piagetian theory of cognitive development to interpret the effect of priming executive schemes for describing relevant features in a referential communication task. Forty-eight 4-year-old children were divided into primed and nonprimed groups and were asked to describe in isolation a black and white…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…

This study attempted to prove a dichotomy between cognitive processes as measured by Piagetian reasoning tasks and those measured by traditional intelligence tests. A battery of tests (Slosson Intelligence Test, Durrell's Silent Reading and Listening Comprehension Test, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, and the Piagetian Measure of Cognitive…

The authors surveyed experts in the field of neuro-behavioral research to determine the directions of progress being made in increasing understanding of neural processing and storage of information. Based on this investigation, their report presents examples of research being pursued in this area. The authors see neuro-behavioral research leading…

The development of children's capacity to induce spatial relations between locations in a space was investigated in this study. The sample consisted of 60 children, 20 in each of three age groups: 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8 years of age. The children were trained to move one hand from a home base to each of three target positions. The positions were…