Working memory (WM) processing in children has been studied with different approaches, focusing on either the organizational structure of WM processing during development (factor analytic) or the influence of different task conditions on WM processing (experimental). The current study combined both approaches, aiming to distinguish verbal and…

Investigates the effects of varying the motivational context of verbal rationales on children's compliance with prohibition. Results indicate that children who received other-oriented rationales performed a greater amount of work and were less likely to show decrements in working over time than did subjects who received self-oriented rationales.…

Reports experiments on the symbolic distance effect and related phenomena with six- and nine-year-old children. The effect was obtained for lexical and pictorial input; pictures produced faster responses than words; congruity effects occurred in the pictorial condition. Asymmetry in subjects' capacity to verify statements of relation was found,…

Two experiments investigated whether poor readers eventually establish a dichotic right ear advantage as predicted by a maturational lag theory. The first studied developmental differences in dichotic listening for normal and poor readers when the order of reporting simultaneously presented items was unconstrained; the second controlled for order…

In three experiments, 18-month-olds were tested in a deferred imitation paradigm. Some infants received verbal information during the demonstration and at the time of the test (full narration), and some did not (empty narration). When tested after a 4-week delay, infants given full narration exhibited superior retention relative to infants given…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

Compared preschool children's reactions to an object described as fearful, positive, or neutral. When the object was described as fearful, younger children's reaction toward the object was inhibited, and older children responded less fearfully than when the object was described as neutral. Positive descriptions did not promote children's approach…

Children and adults were more likely to claim a word was presented as a picture than vice versa. Results indicated the absence of developmental differences in reality monitoring and similarity in representational processes of children and adults. (BC)

Describes the development of the capacity of encoding unfamiliar voices and compares this development with the development of the capacity for encoding faces. Subjects were 20 students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 20 children aged 6 to 16. (MP)

Results revealed that arithmetic-disabled and spelling/arithmetic-disabled children had significantly lower storage and retrieval scores on a nonverbal task but did not differ on a verbal task; reading/spelling-disabled children differed only on retrieval scores from verbal task; and the reading/spelling/arithmetic-disabled children differed only…

Third and fourth grade children were instructed to share half their winnings from a bowling game under one of three types of verbal appeal: a power assertive appeal emphasizing punishment for noncompliance, an inductive appeal emphasizing contributions to the other's well-being, or a neutral appeal. (Author/DB)

Three studies used computer graphics and/or verbal questioning to examine beliefs among children and adults that vision involves input to the eyes (intromission) or emissions from the eye (extramission). Results showed decreases in extramission and increases in intromission beliefs across age. There were more extramission interpretations with…

Tested a normally developing child several times between 16 and 27 months of age for his ability to derive the relations between stimuli. Found that the child derived "mutual entailment" relations and showed "nonverbal exclusion" as early as 17 months. "Combinatorial entailment" relations and "verbal…

Describes a study of three infants whose parents presented vocal models for the infants to imitate. Parents presented vocal models both with and without social praise. Infants showed systematic increases in matching after praise was introduced. Nonmatching vocalizations did not increase with introduction of praise. Findings demonstrate generalized…

This partial replication study of Kail and Siegel (1977), conducted in Ghana and Scotland among boys and girls with 4 and 7 years of education, found no sex differences in relative recall of letters and positions. Evidence that verbal and spatial information is not always processed independently was found. Limitations of intracultural research as…