Interviewed 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 10-year olds, and adults regarding their knowledge about primary-consciousness, reflective-consciousness, and control activities. Found that the recognition that people do not engage in conscious mental activities when unconscious is still developing during the late middle-childhood years. (Author/KB)

This study examined how novel words foster the formation of object categories for 12- to 13-month olds. Results indicated that by 12 to 13 months, infants have begun to distinguish between novel words presented as count nouns versus adjectives in fluent, infant-directed speech, and that infants' expectations for novel words accord with this…

Discusses the use of a dynamic approach to explain how young children master motor skills and perform an array of cognitive feats including word learning. Introduces a perspective that is a departure from established scientific theories of the mind. Argues that a child's physical, mental, and social lives arise out of a shifting interplay between…

Two studies examined whether 1-year olds' name learning during joint attention was guided by expectation that names will be in the form of spoken words. Results showed that 13-month olds, but not 20-month olds, learned a new sound/object correspondence, as evidenced by their choosing targets reliably in responses to hearing the word or sound on…

Examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year olds' conceptions of flags as social conventions and their understandings of the symbolic and psychological consequences associated with transgressions toward flags. Found that despite age-related increases in understanding of flags as meaningful collective symbols, children at all ages considered transgressions to be…

Examined abilities of 3- to 16-year olds and adults to resist interference during the processing of two auditory dimensions of speech--the speaker's gender and spatial location. Found that the degree of interference from irrelevant variability in either dimension did not vary with age. In the presence of conflicting task-irrelevant information,…

This article discusses outcomes of a study that indicated gifted children as young as 6 years old can use metacognitive processes for solving math problems, are aware of knowing certain operations and are able to use them automatically, and know which strategy they usually use for solving problems. (Contains references.) (CR)

Identified strategies mothers use while engaged in an animal categorization activity with their preschool children. Examined the children's verbal behavior. Found that mothers' strategy use varied according to the type of information being taught. Determined the relationship between maternal strategies and verbalizations. (JPB)

Examined preschoolers' ability to map novel adjectives to object properties in two experiments. Found that 4-year-olds could extend novel adjectives from target to matching test object whether objects were drawn from same, or different, basic level categories. If 3-year-olds' first extended a novel adjective to objects in the same basic level…

Interviewed mothers to examine the developmental significance of preschoolers' imaginary companions. Found that relationships with invisible companions were described as sociable and friendly, whereas personified objects were usually nurtured. Object personification frequently occurred as a result of acquiring a toy; invisible friends were viewed…

Studied use of games to teach simple classification and seriation constructs to 3-1/2-year-old children. Found substantial and maintained improvement on classification and seriation. Found that children generalized their new understanding of classification and seriation to different problems, and found that evidence for a more general cognitive…

Compared performance of children with autism, with learning disabilities, and normally developing 4-year-olds on reasoning problems with and without instruction to use imagery. Found that instruction to use imagery led to persistent logical performance. Children with autism displayed a distinctive response pattern, performing around chance levels,…

Investigated effects of two instructional interventions on 5- to 9-year-olds who could perform a balance beam task but either could not explain the principle or had naive theories. Found that more students who had observed the experimenter model and were then encouraged to explain what they saw improved performance over the pretest than students…

Analysis of effects of different starting points on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development II Mental Scale found that starting at the child's chronological age consistently inflated scores, whereas starting at the lowest item set skewed results in the opposite direction. Testing downward until all items are passed and upward until all items are…

Reports on two studies that use new tasks to compare English children's use of strategies that reverse the order of addends in solving addition problems. Shows that knowledge of commutativity among young children is widespread, but does not establish a direct link between this knowledge and children's choice of addition strategies. (DSK)