Changes in visual attention and story comprehension for children (N = 132) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparison peers were examined. Between the ages of 7 and 9 (Phase 1) and approximately 21 months later (Phase 2), children viewed 2 televised stories: 1 in the presence of toys and 1 in their absence. Both groups of…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Lexical priming was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and in age-matched controls (M= 11.5 years), in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. In the visual task, children with RD were found to have deficits in semantic (SHIP-BOAT), phonological/graphemic (GOAT-BOAT), and combined (FLOAT-BOAT) priming. The same pattern of…

Third and sixth graders read an illustrated story and were presented with either a television or radio version of another story. Across a range of comprehension and memory measures, performance in the radio condition and reading were related, while performance in the television condition and reading were not. (Author/CB)

Examined comprehension of stories with and without obstacles to goal attainment among 16 second- and fifth-grade students and 16 adults. Results suggest that processing characteristics of a task, as well as prior knowledge of problem-solving behavior, affect story understanding. (Auhtor/RH)

This research was designed to examine the quality of children's aesthetic understanding of photographs, observe social interactions between parents and children in this aesthetic domain, and study whether qualitatively different dyadic interactions were associated with children's own aesthetic understanding. Parents and children (7-13 years; 40…

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Three experiments investigated (1) whether developmental differences in the information integration rule apply to ulterior motive information; (2) whether such developmental differences are limited to situations involving parental reward; and (3) how related age differences among children can best be explained. (RH)

Seventy-two five year olds viewed a 40-minute version of Sesame Street. Half of the children viewed in the presence of toys and half viewed without toys. The children were then tested for their comprehension of the program. Results suggested that variations in the comprehensibility of the program may determine variations in children's attention to…

Preschool children were tested for their understanding of the words "more" and "less" in a comprehension condition and a construction condition. (Author/JMB)

Across three experiments involving four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the same pattern of ability to sequence events was found: familiar events in forward order were the easiest to sequence, then unfamiliar events in forward order, familiar events in backward order, and finally unfamiliar events in backward order. (Author/RH)

In Experiment 1, personal sentences containing the subject's name were contrasted at two levels of syntactic complexity with impersonal sentences containing other familiar nouns. Experiment 2 was conducted to rule out focusing of attention as an alternative explanation. Results showed that personalized sentence content facilitated children's…

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to decide whether selected contradictory sentences were true or false. The age at which children were first able to evaluate the false sentences correctly corresponded to the relative speed with which adults evaluated the sentences in a timed vertification task. (Author/JMB)