Results suggest that the age composition of peer groups influences the performance of peer-modeled information, thus providing an indication that imitation of peers is a selective process influenced by the relative age of the model to the observer. Data also suggest that observational learning is a complex process involving considerable…

The classifying behavior of five-year-old children and adults was examined in two studies of restricted classification using triads of stimuli composed of the dimensions of length and density. Results were consistent with the notion of separable perception for adults and integral perception for children. (Author/SS)

The ability of three- and four-year-old children to reason about the components of event sequences involving simple transformations was tested in two experiments. In Experiment I children saw picture "stories" of the form object, instrument, and transformed object, with one item deleted. In Experiment II only the instrument item was…

Investigated the possibility that older children recall more than younger ones because they have more information about items available for multiple encoding. (Author/DB)

The early phase of imitation was studied in children between 6 and 18 months by means of the presentation of 22 actions. (SB)

Examined acquisition of the mass/count distinction in English. Results indicated that at 7 years bilinguals did not infer from the linguistic context whether new nouns referred to objects or a substance. By 9 years, bilinguals who were strong in English responded similarly to monolingual peers, but bilinguals with lower English abilities still…

Preterm and full-term infants were assessed on several tasks involving retrieval of a toy. When corrected for age (since conception), but not when compared by chronological age, premature infants tolerated longer delays on AB retrieval tasks than full-term infants. There were no group differences for corrected or chronological age on any other…

Four-, 6-, and 8-year olds were shown a test picture of three related objects and two target pictures of three objects in the same or different relation. Older subjects, but not 4-year olds, identified the relationally similar target picture when the test and target also differed in dimensions of size or color saturation and in direction of size…

Five- through 9-year olds and adults heard ironic and literal criticisms and literal compliments. Found that comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years; and ratings of humor in irony increased with age but ratings of meanness in irony did not. (BC)

A parent-report questionnaire, the Child Routines Inventory (CRI), was administered to 1,492 parents with children between 8 and 72 months of age. Results indicated that frequency of compulsive-like behaviors is more common among 2-, 3- and 4-year olds than among children younger than 1 year or over 4 years of age. Findings are relevant to a…

Interviewed 51 children ages 4 and 5, to obtain narrative representations of mothers--generating Positive, Negative, and Disciplinary representation composites. Found that children who had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations had fewer behavior problems and less psychological distress. Older children…

Two experiments with monolingual German-speaking 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. Correct answers emerged with mastery of the false-belief task. It was concluded that the observed gap constrains de Villiers's linguistic…

Fourth and sixth graders evaluated three types of problematic texts, suggested changes that would make the texts easier to understand, and judged whether four types of revisions improved the comprehensibility of problematic stories. Older children detected more text problems than younger children. Older and younger children did not differ in…

Investigates the ability of 757 children aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 years to judge the importance of intraepisodic and interepisodic story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Children in all groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as being more important than statements with few such relations. (RJC)