How do infants come to understand references to absent objects? 14-month-old infants first learned a name for a novel toy, which was then placed out of view. The infants who listened to a story mentioning the nonvisible object, looked, pointed, and searched for it more often than did infants who heard a story using a different name. Their behavior…

Presents a study which assessed preschool children's understanding of "front,""back," and "side" through a variety of tasks. A developmental sequence is defined. (ED)

Presents two experiments which measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to assess semantic processing. Results suggest that picture-word interference is partly semantically based and that children and adults experience an equivalent amount of semantic interference. (Author/SDH)

The role of reversibility in children's comprehension and memory for sequences of pictures was investigated for children in preschool, kindergarten, and first and second grades. Bidirectionality in the ability to remember and infer antecedents and consequences was assessed. (JMB)

Kindergarten through fourth graders (N=170) were tested for conservation and then interviewed following the presentation of a story about an elderly woman's death, in an attempt to assess children's understanding of 3 concepts: irrevocability, cessation of bodily processes, and universality. (Author/JMB)

A set of decoding tests and picture-word interference tasks was administered to third and fifth graders to explore the relationship between single-word decoding, single-word semantic processing, and text comprehension skill. (BRT)

A multivariate modification of the cross-lagged panel correlation paradigm was applied to data from 4 subgroups of students tested and retested in fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades on 16 essentially identical cognitive measures. Results suggested that the test of aural comprehension was tapping the causal factors involved in intellectual…

Lists three criteria that can codetermine whether a new methodological technique is embraced by developmental researchers. Criteria include theoretical and methodological zeitgeist, conceptual and functional accessibility, and perspective enhancement. Using these criteria, evaluates the potential impact of structural equation modeling. (Author/RH)

Preschoolers were assigned to experimental and control groups to investigate whether they could learn novel words when viewing television and whether the learning was influenced by age or type of word. (PCB)

Two experiments investigate children's knowledge about attentional capacity limits. Preschool children aged three and four years are asked to choose whether they will listen to pairs of stories simultaneously or one at a time. Results demonstrate a preference for listening to one at a time. (Author/RWB)

Finds that, between five and seven years of age, the majority of healthy children in modern urban-industrial societies achieve an understanding of the irreversibility, nonfunctionality, and universality of death. Suggests reasons for ambiguous findings concerning the relationship between the acquisition of the concept of death and developmental…

Level of cognitive development was not significantly related to humor appreciation for either novelty or incongruity humor in 30 boys at each of three age levels: 5, 7, and 9. (WY)

No reliable IQ differences were found when the Stanford-Binet was administered to 100 4-year-old Negro children under two conditions of language (Standard English and Negro dialect) and two conditions of reinforcement (praise and candy). (Author/WY)