Significant relationships were found between linguistic maturity of children, speech of parents, and children's helping behavior. Mean length of utterance was a better predictor of cooperative behavior than child age; no comparable relationships were found for parents' nonverbal behaviors. Results support a hypothesis of verbal mediation of…

Assessed contributions of familiarity, prior experience, and age to frequency and degree of social participation of preschoolers. Normative analysis of group differences indicated that sex, age, prior peer-group experience, and familiarity did not interact and that all of them independently affected 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers' social play.…

Social play emerged earlier than social pretend play with a similar structure; the incidence of social pretend play increased with age. Four strategies for integrating pretense into social play were isolated; among them, verbal recruitment and "join" were found to be more effective than imitation or nonverbal recruitment. (Author/RH)

Tested hypothesis that 4- and 5-year-old children in same-sex problem-solving groups would perform equally well when a group task required various cooperative and self-serving behaviors to enable group to obtain a resource. The hypothesis that girls and boys would employ different behaviors to obtain resource was also tested. Participants were 20…

Examines the dynamics involved when preschoolers aged five years attempt to build replicas of Lego models, either by working alone or with another. Results show that collaboration was more conducive to learning than was independent work and that children were able to generalize their skills. (Author/RWB)

Examines the effect of an unfamiliar peer in a situation requiring a subject's separation from mother in order to play with attractive toys. Observation of 20 children 18 months old and 20 children 30 months old revealed that peer presence facilitated initial separation for both ages, but that age differences in subsequent behaviors existed. (CB)