Maintains that authors' meta-analytic findings make early competence accounts of theory of mind increasingly unlikely. Asserts that findings argue against executive function expression accounts, including that advocated by Scholl and Leslie (PS532407). Explains that meta-analytic findings directly contradict Scholl and Leslie's predictions…

This 1966 paper presents information from a school health education curriculum development project. The basic document emerging from the project included a philosophical basis for health education and structural hierarchy of concepts (growing and developing, decision making, and interactions). The paper describes the conceptual approach to…

This study presents detailed distributional analyses of voice onset times (VOTs) from seven 5-year-old children and 14 adults. Distributional non-normality was common in both data sets with children showing greater skew. Results suggest that theories of VOT development should not be based solely on means and standard deviations but need to address…

The brain has evolved to educate and to be educated, often instinctively and effortlessly. The brain is the machine that allows all forms of learning to take place--from baby squirrels learning how to crack nuts, birds learning to fly, children learning to ride a bike and memorising times-tables to adults learning a new language or mastering how…

The importance of early childhood intervention in a developing country is indisputable. Even though we have a relatively clear idea of what effective early childhood intervention (ECI) means, there are still uncertainties about the roles of professionals in this ever-changing field. In South Africa we face particular challenges because of huge…

It seems evident why Americans have so embraced the notion of self-esteem. On the one hand, an overriding cultural value has been placed on the development of the individual, who emerges all too often as just another material commodity. On the other hand, everything about a distraction/entertainment-driven culture is about feeling good, putting…

This paper examines recent movements in the early childhood education literature that have began to relate sociocultural explanations for human development to the early childhood curriculum. The paper reports the findings from an investigation conducted to determine early childhood educators' conceptions of the curriculum and their understandings…

This research extends the range of domains within which children's gestures are found to play an important role in learning. The study involves children learning about balance, and the authors locate children's gestures within a relevant model of cognitive development--the representational redescription model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The speech…

Dave Sherratt and Gill Donald teach children with autism at Mowbray School, North Yorkshire. Dave Sherratt also teaches at the University of Birmingham and is honorary research fellow at the University College of York St John. Gill Donald is also a specialist speech and language therapist for Hambleton and Richmondshire Primary Care Trust. In this…

Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue) considered many important conceptual and methodological issues in their discussion of emotion regulation. Although it may be necessary to develop an integrated definition of the construct of emotion regulation, the definition provided in the Cole et al. article is too encompassing. It is important to…

Event-related potentials (ERPs), in response to 4 facial expressions of fear, angry, happy, and sad, were collected from 72 institutionalized children (IG), ages 7 to 32 months, in Bucharest, Romania, and compared with ERPs from 33 children, ages 8 to 32 months, who had never been institutionalized (NIG). The NIG and IG exhibited different…

Contrary to past thinking, at birth, infants are capable of exploring their environment and interacting with other humans. They become aware of and learn about their world by observing, exploring, playing, and interacting with their caregivers. Motor skills play a major role in this process, which is achieved by allowing infants to move around,…

How do infants come to understand references to absent objects? 14-month-old infants first learned a name for a novel toy, which was then placed out of view. The infants who listened to a story mentioning the nonvisible object, looked, pointed, and searched for it more often than did infants who heard a story using a different name. Their behavior…

This article reexamines Critical Period and L1/L2 differences by looking at the development of Spanish morphosyntax by young Anglophone immersion learners, in light of two hypotheses, Full Transfer/Full Access (FTFA) and Failed Functional Features (FFFH). FTFA maintains that syntax and morphology develop separately in L2 acquisition for adults and…

Previous research suggests that model competence does not emerge until relatively late in infancy (20-26 months). Development was systematically analyzed within 3 key areas--count noun learning, dual representation, and categorization--hypothesized to support the emergence of model competence in the second year. In an object-handling preferential…