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…

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…

On discrimination learning trials which allowed subjects to press an information key when in doubt, retarded children made significantly more presses than control groups. Results confirmed the hypothesis that retarded children would be more outerdirected than normal children in a situation in which distractibility could not play a role. (Author/GO)

This study compared 3- and 5-year-olds' reports of a true or false play interaction following repeated interviews. Findings indicated age-related improvements in performance. Three-year-olds questioned repeatedly about a false event made more errors in response to specific questions than their age-mates questioned about false details of a true…

Three studies involved kindergartners in a categorization task with an adult in collaborative and noncollaborative conditions; tested subjects on memory of who had performed which actions; and asked them to recategorize items independently. Results suggested that one process contributing to children's internalization of knowledge may involve…

In contrast with younger children of the same reading age, reading-disabled (RD) children performed poorly when they were required to independently abstract grapheme-phoneme (g-p) rules and use them to pronounce pseudowords. Results suggest a phonologically based productive deficit which interferes with the learning of g-p rules. (RH)

Examined phonological processing in a Chinese reading test and on several phonological processing tasks. Found that younger normal and poor readers of Chinese made more semantic and visual errors, whereas older and normally achieving children made more phonologically related errors. Normally achieving readers also performed better than poor…

Results were interpreted as supporting an inhibition deficit theory of mental retardation. (Authors)

Adults' ability to track a moving target was examined in two experiments in order to compare their performance with that of very young infants. Results indicated that (1) adults'"overshoot" errors resembled those reported for young infants; and (2) adults had problems tracking a moving target which unexpectedly changed direction. (Author/DB)

Investigated verbal and nonverbal paired associate learning among 8- to 11-year-old Dutch dyslexic children and chronological-age and reading-age controls. Found that dyslexic children had difficulty with verbal learning of words and nonwords. Phonological and general learning errors were distributed similarly for the reading groups. Found no…