Discusses strategy-like behaviors in a memory-for-location task found in four studies of 18- to 24-month-old children. Interprets results as evidence of an early natural propensity to keep alive what must be remembered, a rudimentary version of what will later become more elaborate mnemonic strategies. (Author/CB)

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)

Production and judgment tasks were used to investigate five- through eight-year-old children's metalinguistic awareness of pragmatic rules concerning direct and indirect requests for action and information. Results showed several effects for age of child and for type of request. (Author/RH)

Studies the allocation of attention of 100 four- and five-year-olds on a selective attention task. Results suggest that preschoolers are capable of using selective strategies when the task is made meaningful by the inclusion of a familiar script that provides supportive cognitive context. (RJC)

Describes preschool children's ability to simultaneously perceive multiple aspects of an object in two experiments during which three- to five-year-olds were asked to describe part/whole pictures. (HOD)

Investigates children's ability to distinguish the literal meaning of a message and a speaker's communicative intent. Either knowing or not knowing the speaker's intended referent, first- and second-grade children evaluated brief referential communication messages for ambiguity. In the first experiment, messages were written on cards and read to…

Examines young children's developing ability to talk about emotions, considers evidence concerning the ability to talk about emotions in the conduct of interpersonal interaction, and offers ideas about future directions for research, emphasizing the functionalist approach to the analysis of emotion-denoting terms. (HOD)

Examines reading awareness and comprehension skills to discover the developmental and instructional relationships between metacognition and performance. Half of the third- and fifth-grade subjects received four months of classroom instruction on reading strategies. Results of pre- and posttests and interviews revealed that the instruction…

Investigates the metalinguistic ability of monolingual or bilingual children between five and nine years of age on two language tasks (grammaticality judgment and correction). (HOD)