We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with…

We studied the acquisition of the ordinal meaning of number words and examined its development relative to the acquisition of the cardinal meaning. Three groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested in two tasks requiring the use of number words in both cardinal and ordinal contexts. Understanding of the counting principles was also…

Most children who are older than 6 years of age apply essential counting principles when they enumerate a set of objects. Essential principles include (a) one-to-one correspondence between items and count words, (b) stable order of the count words, and (c) cardinality--that the last number refers to numerosity. We found that the acquisition of a…

The purpose of this study was to explore individual patterns of strengths and weaknesses in children's mathematical knowledge about common fractions. Tasks that primarily measure either conceptual or procedural aspects of mathematical knowledge were assessed with the same children in their fourth- and fifth-grade years (N = 181, 56% female and 44%…

The ability to both identify and explain others' intentional acts is fundamental for successful social interaction. In two cross-sectional studies, we investigated 3- to 9-year-olds' (n = 148) understanding of the folk concept of intentionality, using three types of intentionality measures. The relationship between this type of reasoning and false…

A 3-week problem-solving practice phase was used to investigate concept-procedure interactions in children's addition and subtraction. A total of 72 7- and 8-year-olds completed a pretest and posttest in which their accuracy and procedures on randomly ordered problems were recorded along with their reports of using concept-based relations in…

We investigated children's ability to generate associations and how automaticity of associative activation unfolds developmentally. Children generated associative responses using a single associate paradigm (Experiment 1) or a Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM)-like multiple associates paradigm (Experiment 2). The results indicated that children's…

This study investigated whether instruction that involves comparing the equal sign with other relational symbols is more effective at imparting a relational interpretation of the equal sign than instruction about the equal sign alone. Third- and fourth-grade students in a comparing symbols group learned about the greater than, less than, and equal…

After the onset of formal schooling, little is known about the development of children's understanding of the arithmetic concepts of inversion and associativity. On problems of the form a+b-b (e.g., 3+26-26), if children understand the inversion concept (i.e., that addition and subtraction are inverse operations), then no calculations are needed…

In the field of children's knowledge of the earth, much debate has concerned the question of whether children's naive knowledge--that is, their knowledge before they acquire the standard scientific theory--is coherent (i.e., theory-like) or fragmented. We conducted two studies with large samples (N = 328 and N = 381) using a new paper-and-pencil…

In their lead articles, both Kowalski and Zimiles (2006) and O'Hanlon and Roberson (2006) declare a general relation between color term knowledge and the ability to conceptually represent color. Kowalski and Zimiles, in particular, argue for a priority for the conceptual representation in color term acquisition. The complexities of the interaction…

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization.…

Reports two experiments: 1) to determine whether children perform as adults in the simple and successive-reversal concept identification problems and to assess their retention of stimulus-response information; and 2) to determine the associative strength of the pain of response words. (Author/AJ)