Background: The majority of children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience challenges in functional communication from a young age. A pivotal aspect of functional communication is language comprehension. A variety of classification systems and questionnaires are available to classify and describe functional communication skills in children with CP.…

This article introduces the revised and updated "DC:0-5™: Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood." The authors describe the past and current efforts to create a developmentally based classification system for very young children. DC:0-3, published in 1994 by ZERO TO THREE,…

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…

Aim: The aim of this study was to describe how the usefulness of the hemiplegic hand develops in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) aged between 18 months and 8 years. Method: A prospective longitudinal study of 43 children (22 males, 21 females) with unilateral CP was conducted. Inclusion age was 18 months to 5 years 4 months (mean 2y…

The present study investigated the role of the causal status of features and feature type in biological categorizations by young children. Study 1 showed that 5-year-olds are more strongly influenced by causal features than effect features; 4-year-olds exhibit no such tendency. There therefore appears to be a conceptual change between the ages of…

Two studies (N = 456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these 2…

Classification of the quality and topographical pattern of motor impairment is used to describe cerebral palsy (CP). As an adjunct to a study characterizing the quality of life and participation of school-age children with CP, initial and follow-up classification of CP were compared. A cohort of 93 children (58 males, 35 females) were initially…

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral…

Generic sentences (such as "Birds lay eggs") are important in that they refer to kinds (e.g., birds as a group) rather than individuals (e.g., the birds in the henhouse). The present set of studies examined aspects of how generic nouns are understood by English speakers. Adults and children (4- and 5-year-olds) were presented with scenarios about…

We describe the cognitive profile in a complete national cohort of children with cerebral palsy (CP). One hundred and twenty-seven Icelandic children (67 females, 60 males) with CP, born between 1985 and 2000 and assessed between the ages of 4 and 6 years 6 months (mean age 5y 5mo, SD 6mo), were included in the study. IQ was measured using the…

Examined whether a holistic magnitude relation governs children's object comparisons. Objects varying on two dimensions of magnitude, size, and saturation were classified by three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Results indicated that younger children were sensitive to global magnitude as well as to overall similarity. (Author/BE)

Classified children's use of cognitive strategies on a multitrial sort-recall task. Compared to fourth graders, more second and third graders were classified utilizationally deficient; fourth graders were more likely to be classified as quasi-utilizationally deficient. Levels of recall and clustering were higher for younger utilizationally…

Expectations concerning form and color in object label referencing of 80 children of 2-3 years were examined in 2 studies. Findings show that children as young as 2 expect form similarity to be a better guide than color similarity to the extension of object labels. (RJC)

Tool use is central to interdisciplinary debates about the evolution and distinctiveness of human intelligence, yet little is actually known about how human conceptions of artifacts develop. Results across these two studies show that even 2-year-olds approach artifacts in ways distinct from captive tool-using monkeys. Contrary to adult intuition,…

The present study tests a model of category effects upon stimulus estimation in children. Prior work with adults suggests that people inductively generalize distributional information about a category of stimuli and use this information to adjust their estimates of individual stimuli in a way that maximizes average accuracy in estimation (see…