Forty children were divided into four groups and administered the Tower of Hanoi puzzle using static and dynamic approaches. The benefits of age and ability were indicated by significant improvement from the general failure of the four- to five-year olds to the success of the majority of the high ability seven- to eight-year olds. (Author/JDD)

Linguistic and cognitive development of 26 premature and 27 full-term infants was studied longitudinally over the first 3 years of life. Patterns of lexical and cognitive development did not differ substantially between groups, nor did standard language test measures indicate differences at the study's end except with very low birthweight…

Explored differences in the social and cognitive development of 4-year-olds in junior kindergarten taught by differentially educated instructors. Found that children taught by early childhood educators with 2-year college degrees in early childhood education and those taught by teachers with a university teaching certificate did not differ in…

Examined whether parenting and child characteristics of term and preterm 2- and 3.5-year-olds had common paths of influence on children's independent cognitive and social functioning at age 4.5 years. Found that high levels of mothers' maintaining children's interests across these ages supported later independence, but directiveness needed to…

Three experiments examined kindergartners' and second graders' retention in the context of two distinctiveness manipulations, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Results showed that: older children retained more information from lists of pictures or interactive images over 3 weeks than younger; younger children failed to benefit from…

Two experiments tracked infants' eye movements to examine use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. Results indicated that 21- and 18-month-olds recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as whole words. Infants' productive vocabulary and reaction time were related to word recognition accuracy. Results show that…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) analyze the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners in off-line and on-line tasks and compare their performance with that of adult monolinguals. They conclude that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing (the contiguity assumption), with…

This paper presents a strategy for measuring cognitive gains in reading during the early school years. It is argued that accurate estimates of gain scores and their appropriate interpretation requires the use of adaptive tests with multiple criterion referenced points that mark learning milestones. It is further argued that two different measures…

The current study examines the social and behavioral development of school-age children with different histories of overweight onset. Eight thousand children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) participated. Three groups of children were identified for analysis: (1) those who were persistently overweight from…

This paper discusses the cultural-historical school founded by Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev as the theoretical background of Russian educational psychologists who have been studying how children learn to reflect. Two approaches to reflection are examined within the cultural-historical tradition: first, reflection--like other higher psychological…

This study sought to determine whether differences existed between infants from low socioeconomic status (SES) families and those from high SES families in the occipital rhythmic activity of the brain, as recorded in their electroencephalograms (EEGs), as well as in other developmental measures. Ten low SES white infants and 10 high SES white…

The physical and neurobehavioral findings at 3 years of age for 39 children born to mothers on methadone- maintenance and 23 children born to drug-free comparison mothers are reported. The methadone children had a higher incidence of head circumferences less than the third percentile, nystagmus/strabismus, and otitis media. No differences were…

The revised version of this monograph serves two purposes: (1) to describe what the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) measures with regard to reading/learning disability in the light of current findings, and (2) to summarize research with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and WISC-R as related to…

A study was made to examine effects of peer collaboration on children's cognitive development and to ascertain whether effects of collaboration varied across American and Russian cultures. A total of 84 girls and boys (42 from a kindergarten in Moscow and 42 from an elementary school in Ithaca, New York), 5 through 7 years of age, initially…