Presents a theory of child-development stages that reflects the relationship between children's play and the need to create a personal identity. Considers the relationship between socializing play and individuation, and defines four stages of identity development through play: amorphous, play, games, and generalization and maturity. (JPB)

In this study, six percent of a 2-year-old child's spontaneous utterances in six 3-hour samples were identified as one of three expressive metalinguistic utterance types: interrogatives, hypothesis tests, and evocative utterances. Evocative utterances were used most frequently. The subject used the strategies to seek nouns 78 percent of the time.…

This article proposes a new schema for defining developmental stages in the drawing of geometrical objects. In four studies, children and adults drew cubes and cylinders. Data demonstrate that stages appear in invariant order with 2-year-olds drawing scribbles, single units appearing at 3 years, differentiated figures at 4 years, and integrated…

Summarizes Bruer's work, which questions the prevailing emphasis on the first 3 years as most critical to brain development. Notes that the book both elucidates a "blueprint" for mounting an effective public awareness campaign, and provides an excellent synopsis of implications of contemporary neuroscience for early childhood education…

Exposes the structural-functionalist roots of Kohlberg's theory of moral development, questioning the application of Kohlberg's ideas in the classroom, reviewing Kohlberg's Just Community model, examining Durkheim's and Dreeben's theories and their similarity to Kohlberg's moral theory, critiquing Kohlberg's conception of the Just Community…

Two experiments used a mutual imitation paradigm to assess 9-, 14-, and 18-month-old infants' developing understanding of intentions in others. In the first study, 1 experimenter imitated the infants' actions, and another experimenter performed contingent but different actions on an identical toy. From 9 months of age, infants show discrimination…

Research using retrospective or cross-sectional data suggests that suicidal ideation rates peak during mid-adolescence. This study used a longitudinal, community sample of adolescents who reported suicidal ideation repeatedly over 7 years to examine suicidal ideation trends. We hypothesized that a mid-adolescence peak in ideation is limited to…

Developmental researchers face a perilous path as they set out to perform research with child advocacy potential. We offer our observations regarding how researchers can navigate the path between science (the "rock") and advocacy (the "soft place"), based on our recent experience as directors of the MacArthur Juvenile Adjudicative Competence…

This paper uses a combination of perceptual and electropalatographic (EPG) analysis to explore the presence and characteristics of connected speech processes in the speech output of five older children with developmental speech impairments. Each of the children is shown to use some processes typical of normal speech production but also to use a…

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…

Research on age-related effects in L2 development often invokes the idea of a critical period--the postulation of which is customarily referred to as the Critical Period Hypothesis. This paper argues that to speak in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis is misleading, since there is a vast amount of variation in the way in which the critical…

Over the last fifty years, in three distinct waves of research, psychologists have investigated the religious thinking of children and adolescents. However, they have differed substantially in their conceptual frameworks, methods, and conclusions, making it difficult for educators to determine the overall implications of their findings for…

In the past, there were no four-year-olds to be found in infant or primary schools. The statutory school age of five had been established in 1870, after a hurried and confused debate in the House of Commons; one hundred years later, it was a regulation still honoured in practice. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, children started school in the term…

A study was conducted, as a means to encourage literacy beyond "book reading" that stressed the importance of taking into account the range of literacy events that exist in people's lives everyday. It was found that literacy learning could take place within the everyday context of living, and that these events can reveal the kinds of mental…

Global accounts of cognitive development, best illustrated by Piaget's theory, dominated the field until the 1970s and 1980s, when they were gradually superseded by domain-specific accounts. In this article I present evidence suggesting that both global and domain-specific processes make important contributions to cognitive development, and I…