Argues that the questioning and answering interaction provides a setting whereby adults can socialize naive children into communal views of reality. It is suggested, however, that this tradition acts both as a brake and as a springboard to the acquisition of new knowledge. (MS)

Theoretical concepts from multivariate developmental psychology and systems theory are used to describe qualitative and quantitative change in three cognitive subsystems: perceiving, conceptualizing, and symbolizing. Available from: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 355 Chestnut Street, Norwood, New Jersey 07648. (CL)

Two models of intertask relations, Wohlwill's divergent-decalage and reciprocal-interaction patterns, were evaluated for their fit to cross-classification tables which showed the joint classification of 101 children's performance on all possible pairs of eight concrete operational tasks. (SB)

The study with 30 five-year-olds and 30 seven-year-olds demonstrated that children as young as five have an emerging ability to solve both verbal and perceptual proportional analogy problems and to detect the meaning of proportional metaphoric sentences. (Author/DB)

Maintains that Teyler and Fountain's presentation (1987) contains several limitations, namely, that the authors do not (1) distinguish between learning and memory, nor between storage and retrieval; (2) address the role of knowledge-based influences in memory and learning; or (3) employ concepts that can accommodate developmental phenomena in the…

Results of two experiments on kindergarten children in Japan indicate that young children can, and often do, apply personification as an analogy to animate objects to generate a reasonable prediction. It was also found that children try to constrain the personification by using additional knowledge. (PCB)

Four experiments studied 4- to 6-year-old children's understanding of inferential reasoning as a source of knowledge. To assess understanding that knowledge of relevant premises leads to knowledge of the conclusion, children had to judge the knowledge of another person, who was presented to the child as being aware of two premises. (Author/BN)

This paper examines the nature of the child's disclosure of sexual abuse and assesses the impact of developmental variables on that disclosure. When those variables are recognized, the credibilty of the young child as a witness in court increases. The paper focuses on children between the ages of two and seven. (Author/BN)

Argues for a cognitive-based curriculum which ensures that students participate fully in using writing as a mode of learning. Discusses Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills: (1) knowledge; (2) comprehension; (3) application; (4) synthesis; and (5) evaluation. (RAE)

Studies were designed to test the prediction that spatial search strategies in infants may be influenced by locomotor experience. The pattern of findings suggests that infants with efficient modes of locomotion are more likely than others to profit from the experiences generated by locomotion. (RJC)

Studied the effects of adult intervention on 10-month-old infants' level of attention to objects. The overall duration of infant attention increased during medium intervention when the duration was compared to that of the control group. Low attending infants attended more in medium and high intervention, while high attending infants were…

Investigated Japanese children's understanding of the difference between real and apparent emotion. Children aged four to six years listened to and answered questions about stories in which the protagonist masked strong emotions. Results showed six-year-olds understood real versus apparent emotion more systematically than did four-year-olds. (SKC)

Findings indicate that infants can detect regularity in spatiotemporal series; will develop expectancies for events in the series; and will act on the basis of those expectancies even when their actions have no effect on the stimulus events. (PCB)

The study examined the cartoon humor comprehension of 30 learning disabled and 30 non-handicapped boys in two age groups, eight- and twelve-year-olds. Significant main effects were found indicating a developmental lag in the cognitive structure necessary for understanding humor in the learning disabled subjects. (Author/DB)

The relationships among decentration, decontexturalization, and integration in the same children were investigated to reexamine sequences of actor-object play for the purpose of revising and extending previous models. The results contribute to the understanding of complex play by establishing the variability of component relationships and…