Examines young children's awareness that an actor's intention to transfer possession or control is a necessary precondition for correct use of the verb "give". Ninety-six four- through six-year-olds were presented with anecdotes in which the actor's behavior was held constant but his subjective goal was varied. (Author/RH)

Children's use of the terms "lie" and "truth" was examined. Participants were 150 subjects in five groups: nursery schoolers, preschoolers, first graders, fifth graders, and adults. Results support the development of definitional prototypes for the concepts of lie and truth. (RH)

Two experiments investigated the possibility that three year olds would do better on tasks in which belief cues were stronger than on standard false belief tasks, in which the children could reason backward to the belief from its effects. Findings provided strong support for the view that three year olds do not fully understand the…

Subjects were 30 participants at each of 4 ages: 5, 7, and 10 years, and adult. Subjects described objects ordered in pairs. Children of 5 and 7 years improved their ability to understand visual metaphors which display a topic-visual interaction. From age 5 to adulthood, subjects improved their ability to comprehend metaphoric similarity. (RH)

Nine tasks were designed to test the developmental sequence of three types of "because" (affective, physical, concrete logical) in 100 children aged 3 to 7 years. The tasks tested whether comprehension of "because" preceded its usage and at what point children understood that sentences with reversed clauses were incorrect.…

Second, fifth, and eighth graders viewed one of four edited versions of a commercial action-adventure television program that varied in number of scenes and in degree of organization. Both recognition and recall measures were used to assess children's memory for central content, peripheral content, and implicit content. (Author/JMB)

Investigates the relationship between children's cognitive and affective processes in 30 four and five year olds who were interviewed individually to probe affective understanding, administered a series of Piagetian tasks, and given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Performance on affective and cognitive tasks correlated significantly.…

The study investigated the communicative effectiveness of word order in preschoolers' comprehension of meaning using simple questions and commands in an at-home play context. (ST)

Analysis indicates that both 5 and 7-year-old children are capable of distinguishing between anomalous and meaningful sentences although 7-year-olds demonstrate greater awareness of selection restriction rules. (Authors)

Subjects responded most accurately to sentences representing temporal order and to and then but first" commands than to before/after" commands. (Author)

Examines whether young children and adults are able to interpret sarcastic utterances and whether placements of contextual information before or after the utterance differentially affect interpretation. Results obtained from first and third graders and from college students indicated that different placements of contextual information do affect…

Examines the relationship between children's attention and comprehension of auditory and visual information on television. After viewing a videotape of "Sesame Street" with visual, auditory, or no distractors, 60 five-year-olds were asked comprehension questions. Findings indicated that children could process auditory and visual…

Preschool- and kindergarten-age children's understanding of the distinct referential properties of collective and class nouns and the relationship between this understanding and performance in part-whole comparison tasks was examined in three experiments. Results indicate children understand the relationship between nouns and the sets to which…

Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

Seeks to determine (1) whether 11- and 13-month-old infants directed their eye fixations to the referent of an object word said by the mother, and (2) whether there was a developmental shift in responding to object words at these two ages. Controls were set for response bias, stimulus preference, and maternal cuing. (Author/RH)