Explores the role of language in peer interaction and play of deaf children, taking into consideration the effect of hearing status, familiarity, and experience in playing with deaf children. (HOD)

Tabulated the frequencies of dyadic and group interactions in single-sex playgroups of 4- and 6-year-olds. Found that boys and girls at both ages engaged in similar frequencies but in different patterns of dyadic interactions. Only 6-year-old boys interacted in groups. (BC)

Compared teaching and learning measures of 16 mother-child and sibling dyads playing a picture categorization game. Found that although siblings' teaching styles directed target children to make the correct choices, mothers provided information to help them make choices on their own, suggesting differences in how mothers and siblings interpreted…

Data from 24 mothers and fathers who worked separately with their 3-year-old children on difficult block construction, matrix classification, and story retelling tasks were consistent with the hypothesis that authoritative parents may obtain some of their reported success in cognitive skill socialization by using a tutoring style that is more…

Compared the sensitivity and teaching strategies of white, middle-class dysphoric and nondysphoric women working with unfamiliar five- and six-year olds during classification tasks and unstructured activities. Found that nondysphoric women were more sensitive to children's level of understanding than dysphoric women and were more likely to use a…

Two experiments examined the relationship between developmental improvement in performance on tasks requiring acquisition of spatial knowledge and age-sensitive cognitive abilities. Found that age differences in landmark knowledge were mediated primarily by recognition-in-context memory and that age differences in route knowledge were mediated…

In three amplitude discrimination experiments involving a backward masking task, children's rate of perceptual processing was compared to that of adults. Developmental differences in discrimination were compensated for by increases in the psychophysical difference between test tones. No developmental differences in rate of perceptual processing…

Assessments of marital interaction during conflict resolution obtained when children were five-years-old predicted teachers' ratings of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors when the children were eight-years-old. In particular, the "Mutually Hostile" marital interaction pattern correlated with later marital dissolution…

Tested the fine-tuning hypothesis of language acquisition, which postulates that parents fine-tune their speech to their children's language level, by examining local patterns of interaction within the conversations of three parent-child dyads. The high positive correlations between parent-child dyads for the different interactional patterns…

In individual interviews, 80 children ages 4-8 predicted which of 5 emotions they would feel, and how intensely, to 15 affect-laden situations. Results indicated that responses involve three dimensions of emotion cognition (intensity, multiplicity, and valence) that emerge in four developmental stages. By age eight, children can predict multiple…

Grandparents' and mothers' drug use predicted hyperactivity, psychosomatic complaints, and social problems for boys, and acting-out behaviors for boys and girls. Maternal drug use predicted fearfulness, hyperactivity, and social problems for boys, and developmental problems for boys and girls. (BC)

Examines the research of Morgan, Bonamo, and Travis (1995) to detect the effects of recasted error correction on children's emerging grammar. Notes that regression procedures used by Morgan and others could not discriminate between the data generated by models in which recasts totally determined grammatical learning, supplemented other learning,…

The failure of Bohannon, Padgett, Nelson, and Mark's (1996) time-series analysis to distinguish among varying models of recast function is shown to be attributable to confounding of parameters and idiosyncratic assumptions adopted in generating simulated data from these models. (MDM)

Examined the association between attachment and emotional understanding in 2.5- to 6-year olds. Found that age and attachment security predicted a child's aggregate score on emotional understanding tasks. When the score was separated by valence of the emotion, attachment security and age predicted a child's score for only emotions with negative…

Investigated whether the content of infant speech productions is better characterized as preserving stressed and final syllables or as preserving a trochaic pattern; used a detailed longitudinal description of one child's syllable omission. Found that the trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. (Author/JPB)