Two graduate student groups (n=7 and n=6) used both computerized groups support systems and traditional methods to complete collaborative tasks. The progress and stages of development of one group was erratic, whereas the other evolved into a high-performance group. Technology reduced some group conflict but had little impact on group development.…

A narrative approach can eliminate the shortcomings of stage and phase models of adult development. Narrative is based on constructivist epistemology and central to human meaning making. Time and narrative are integrally related; narrative is historical and can be understood as interpretation of life stories. Individual and cultural narratives are…

This study compared the prelinguistic vocal development of 30 9- month-old babies with unrepaired cleft palate and age-matched peers (N=15). Fewer of the babies with cleft palate had reached the canonical babbling stage (57 percent versus 93 percent) and had smaller consonant inventories. However, syllable types and length and number of…

Three developmental connectionist models simulate a purported shift from "featural" to "correlational" processing in infant categorization (models: Gureckis & Love, 2004/this issue; Shultz & Cohen, 2004/this issue; Westermann & Mareschal, 2004/this issue; empirical data: Cohen & Arthur, 2003; Younger, 1985; Younger & Cohen, 1986). In this article,…

A well-known characteristic of children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a significant deficit in grammatical morphology production compared with younger, language-matched, typically developing children. This is true for present tense be (am, is, are), as well as other inflectional morphemes. However, grammatical morpheme learning by…

When middle schools align themselves with high schools, the educational and developmental transition of early adolescents succeeds. Begin the work of transitioning sooner and high schools will spend less time acclimating students to the demands of high school and more time teaching new material. This article discusses the importance of aligning…

The Early Childhood profession would benefit from a systematic inquiry into "calendar math." The authors offer an organized framework for this work. After a description of calendar math practices, the authors examine problematic aspects of its implementation, based on developmental theory. The essay concludes with a call for more reflective…

Gottlieb's (1991/2007) target article represents a milestone in our understanding of the impact of social experience on developmental malleability. Interactions across the species-typical and operant behavior categories are increasingly understood to exist. The social contingencies present in the normal species-typical developmental manifold are…

Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…

Playing games, particularly pretense games, is one of the areas where young children first enter into collective, conventional practices. This chapter reviews recent empirical data in support of this claim and explores the idea that games present a cradle for children's growing into societal and institutional life more generally. (Contains 2…

The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental trajectory of error monitoring. For this purpose, children (age 7-8), young adolescents (age 13-14) and adults (age 23-24) performed a Go/No-Go task and were compared on overt reaction time (RT) performance and on event-related potentials (ERPs), thought to reflect error detection…

Relative to other ages, adolescence is described as a period of increased impulsive and risk-taking behavior that can lead to fatal outcomes (suicide, substance abuse, HIV, accidents, etc.). This study was designed to examine neural correlates of risk-taking behavior in adolescents, relative to children and adults, in order to predict who may be…

Research suggests that while information about design is a central feature of older children's artifact representations it may be less important in the artifact representations of younger children. Three experiments explore the pattern of responses that 5- and 7-year-old children generate when asked to produce multiple uses for familiar…

Using a symbolic object such as a model as a source of information about something else requires some appreciation of the relation between the symbol and what it represents. Representational insight has been proposed as essential to success in a symbolic retrieval task in which children must use information from a hiding event in a scale model to…

This author argues that youth sports can move beyond the dichotomy of cooperation versus competition by redefining competition. This can be accomplished by considering the development of cooperative skills and achievement motivation. The article addresses how cooperative skills can be taught within a competitive sport. First, it is important to…