Investigates assumptions young listeners may make about speaker authoritativeness. First and fourth graders were asked how the protagonist in a story would respond to what could be interpreted as redundant directions. Stories varied in terms of age and certainty of speaker. (Author/RH)

Investigates reciprocity in friends' knowledge of each other's personal-social characteristics as a function of age and type of friendship. Using a picture-sort procedure, 48 first- and fourth-grade dyads from mutual and unilateral friendships selected items most descriptive of themselves and their friends. (Author/RH)

Fourth and seventh grade children received four free-recall trials on lists including typical and atypical items. Levels of recall and clustering increased with age and were greater for typical than for atypical items. More older children used organizational strategies to facilitate recall. (SKC)

Explores children's judgments of the relative effectiveness of four memory strategies (looking, naming, rehearsing, and categorizing.) Strategy judgment data were analyzed using Thurstone's Method of Paired Comparisons. (Author/NH)

Differences in comprehension, production, and appreciation of humor were explored among a total of 47 second and fourth graders, of whom 26 fourth graders had learning disabilities or developmental handicaps. Although children without disabilities comprehended cartoons better, no production differences were observed. (Author/DB)

Uses a sample of 33 second graders and 34 fourth graders to examine the tendency of children to perceive illusory correlations leading to greater recall of events that confirm sex stereotypes. Finds that both age groups perceived illusory correlations, giving the highest frequency estimates to traditional stimuli. (FMW)

When first, fourth, and fifth grade speakers played a referential communication game with a fictitious listener, they were more likely to give redundant messages to listeners with whom they had no common shared experience or to strangers than to listeners with whom they had shared a previous experience. (RH)

A five-year follow-up of arithmetic calculation abilities of 10 low-income fourth graders with specific language impairment (SLI) involved comparisons with typically developing same age peers and with typically developing younger subjects. Results support evidence that children with SLI have difficulty with rote memory and document the…

Investigates whether first- and fourth-grade children vary their production of redundant messages (saying more than the minimal necessary to be informative) as a function of sharing common experience with a listener. (HOD)

A study was conducted to investigate the peer concepts held by 16 second-grade, 17 fourth-grade, and 17 sixth-grade students. A paired comparisons sociometric procedure was used to obtain children's descriptions of their classmates in the areas of reading, mathematics, drawing, and an athletic skill (running). In addition, the procedure measured…

Tested hypothesis that understanding validity of inference is a relatively late development by asking fourth and seventh graders and college students to sort sets of deductive arguments. None of fourth graders, 45 percent of seventh graders, and 85 percent of college students used validity as basis for distinguishing arguments. Experiments…

First, fourth, seventh, and tenth graders were timed when solving simple and complex addition problems, then were presented similar problems in untimed interviews. Manipulation of confusion between addition and multiplication, where multiplication answers were given to addition problems (3 + 4 = 12) indicated an interrelatedness of these…

Describes two experiments comparing how children evaluate three types of uninformative messages (ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent) and whether and why the speaker's age affects the evaluation of each. (HOD)

Employing a new procedure for measuring peer concepts, this study investigated the development of differentiation and accuracy of children's concepts of their peers' attributes. Subjects, 18 second-graders, 23 fourth-graders, and 18 sixth-graders, were asked to rate characteristics of their peers in mathematics, athletics (running), and in two…

When kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, and college students listened to stories and were asked to predict and explain the story character's behavioral or emotional reaction to a new event, the use of personality attributions to predict and explain future reactions increased with age. (RH)