A study investigated the validity of a linking rule of object affectedness; the rule states that an argument is expressed as the direct object of a verb if its referent is specified as affected in a specific way in the semantic representation of the verb. Specifically, the study examined whether the principle determines which argument will be…

This study examined the effects of misleading information on children's memory for a real-life event. In play sessions involving an experimenter, 36 6-year-olds and 36 9-year-olds individually participated by playing games with a research assistant. In the sessions, six critical items were present: two items identified the room; two identified the…

As an aid to contemporary research, this paper examines historical ideas about young children's use of strategies for memorization and the transfer of such strategies to different contexts. Discussion focuses on (1) current approaches to inducing transfer of strategies; (2) Thorndike and Woodworth's concept of identical elements; (3) Gestalt…

Playing with blocks can facilitate the creative, social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development of young children. This article presents information and activities concerning block play and its role in young children's experience. Topics covered include: (1) types of blocks; (2) selection of blocks and accessories; (3) planning of the…

The study examined the speech production strategies used by 4 young children (30- to 32-months-old) with cleft palate and velopharyngeal inadequacy during the early stages of phonological learning. All the children had had primary palatal surgery and were producing primarily single word utterances with a few 2- and 3-word phrases. Analysis of each…

According to Lev Vygotsky, private speech has a functional value for the child during problem solving. As children grow older, private speech is thought to become inner, non-observable speech. Both private and inner speech are abbreviated. A study tested the hypothesis of the progressive abbreviation of private speech. Private speech data were…

Exploring the relationship between strategy training and the child's apparent knowledge, this study assessed (1) whether the effects of rehearsal training without added metamnemonic feedback would be evident one week after training, and (2) the effects of specific training upon more general metamnemonic awareness. Initially 40 children 6 years of…

Conventional scoring of the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) was compared with three methods of multiple weight scoring. The methods include: (1) theoretical weighting in which the weights were based on a theory of cognitive processing; (2) judged weighting in which the weights were given by a group of nine adult expert judges; and (3)…

A study investigated the development of children's metalinguistic understanding of the meanings of two non-ostensive words beyond the usual semantic acquisition period. The words, whose meanings cannot be associated with an object by pointing, were "pain" and "pretend". Two specific questions were addressed: What types of…

The study investigated the effect of object preference on the learning of signs by 12 severely and profoundly retarded children (4-7 years old). Signs were chosen that were two-handed, symmetrical, and abstract. Training of each sign consisted of 10 individual training sessions using operant techniques. Results revealed no differences in the…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

Although Mandarin is a discourse topic oriented language rather than a subject and sentence oriented one, Chinese children acquiring Mandarin attempt in their early speech to exactly mark the same referential grammatical relationships as subject, object, location, and instrument by using case or ergative markers. Only after marking a closed set of…

The absolutive voice is a fact of life for Guatemalan children who speak the Mayan language K'iche' and one that enters their verbal lexicon fairly early. Data suggest that by the time the children are 3-year-olds they have encountered several instances of verbs that alternate between active and absolutive forms, which may supply the evidence…

Four developmental outcomes of children's play were identified as acquaintance with the environment and the development of cognitive activity, verification of incidental learning, the development through sensory and motoric activities of relationships with objects and persons, and experience with roles and rules. A child developing atypically may…

Distinguishing two forms of inference (additive and general vicariance), this paper describes a procedure for assessing class vicariance that attempts to control potentially confounding effects of verbal comprehension. The term "class vicariance" refers to the inference that a class remains invariant under arbitrary dichotomous…