Examined in 4 experiments 3- and 4-year-olds' ability to communicate about containment and proximity relations. Found that when describing where a toy mouse was hidden, children were more likely to successfully disambiguate a small landmark when it was in, rather than next to, the large landmark. Three-year-olds initiated searches faster when the…

Summarizes similarities and differences between the working memory models of Pascual-Leone and Baddeley. Debates whether each model makes a specific contribution to explanation of Kemps, De Rammelaere, and Desmet's results. Argues for necessity of theoretical task analyses. Compares a study similar to that of Kemps et al. in which different…

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

Examined whether 6-month-olds expect people to behave differently toward persons and inanimate objects. Found that infants habituated to an actor talking to something hidden behind an occluder looked longer at an object, whereas infants habituated to an actor reaching and swiping looked longer at a person. No difference in looking at stimuli was…

Two studies investigated whether language-specific patterns encoding manner and direction of motion in English and Greek affect adult and child speakers' performance on nonlinguistic motion tasks and linguistic descriptions of these motion events. Although the two linguistic groups differed in linguistic preferences, nonlinguistic task performance…

Investigated 4-, 8-, and 11-year-olds' ability to categorize intentionally false and true statements as lies and truths. Found that older children were more likely to categorize false statements as lies and true statements as truths than were 4-year-olds. Antisocial lies were rated as most serious, and "white lies" as least serious.…

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage…

Preschoolers viewed stimulus sets comprised of a sample picture and three types of matches and were asked to choose a match that "went with" each sample. Children's choices indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias. Animate sample stimuli enhanced children's tendency to adopt…

Lev Vygotsky (1986-1934) was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with the entire learning-teaching-development experience. Despite a wide-ranging interest in Vygotskian theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of general inquiries into his work. Thus, there…

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18-month-olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental…

Generation enhances memory for occurrence but may not enhance other aspects of memory. The present study further delineates the negative generation effect in context memory reported in N. W. Mulligan (2004). First, the negative generation effect occurred for perceptual attributes of the target item (its color and font) but not for extratarget…

This presentation deals with the topic of ethnic/racial identity development, acknowledging the importance of recognizing the multicultural component in identity formation. The literature has pointed to several areas that are central to effective prejudice-prevention and prejudice-reduction programming, among them an emphasis on cognitive…

In this case study, the language and cognitive development of a 4-year 5-month old profoundly deaf girl and her normally hearing identical twin sister were investigated by videotaping the twins in their home interacting with each other, the investigator, and family members. Materials used with the children were designed to elicit spontaneous,…

In order to determine which kind of mathematics program would produce the best results for kindergarten children, three programs from different theoretical perspectives were developed. The first program, behavioristic in focus, made use of texts, worksheets, and seatwork. The second, cognitive-developmental in outlook, stressed conceptualization…

The Maryland career course is a one-credit career planning course for undecided undergraduates based on William Perry's (1970) model of intellectual and ethical development. The Perry model can be described using four major and sometimes overlapping divisions which represent a series of positions on learning, i.e., Dualism, Multiplicity,…