Pretend play is important for children's development. However, recent research indicates that, as preschool children age and get more proficient at pretend play, they prefer real objects. We examined whether toddlers prefer real objects when they are younger as well as when they are older and more proficient in pretend play situations. Forty-three…

Studies on development and fairness judgments in resource allocations have mainly addressed the distribution of reward. However, the distribution of responsibility also requires exploration in the context of research on development and distributive justice. For an integrated understanding of reward and responsibility distributions, we briefly…

A wealth of developmental research suggests that preschoolers are capable of reporting, imitating, and performing sequential actions they engage in routinely. However, few studies have explored the developmental and cognitive mechanisms required for learning how to perform such routines. A previous computational model of routines argued that a…

This study investigated age differences in the utilization of visually contrastive information (i.e., differently colored identical objects) for temporary referential ambiguity resolution during spoken sentence comprehension. Five- and 6-year-old Japanese children and adults listened to sentences that contained a color adjective-noun combination…

This study addresses children's Kyoiku (education) as it is explored by two kindergartens in Japan. It reports how the teachers, parents and children defined and experienced children's education and draws on the sociocultural concepts to understand their perspectives. Situated in the personal, educational, and sociocultural landscape of the…

The purpose of this article is to explore the way preschool teachers teach reflective care in Japan. The article builds on a two-month ethnographic study conducted in Japanese kindergartens and nurseries among children aged 3-6 years. The data were analysed using concepts of age and gender. The results show that care in Japan, in contrast to…

This study examined whether children understand that people selectively conceal or express emotion depending upon the context. We prepared two contexts for a verbal display task for 70 first-graders, 80 third-graders, 64 fifth-graders, and 71 adults. In both contexts, protagonists had negative feelings because of the behavior of the other…

Teachers' perspectives of play differ widely because of social and cultural influences that can be seen in their values and beliefs about play in different countries. In a global community, sharing educators' knowledge of play and their perspectives of how to educate children through the use of play would be appropriate and complementary in…

The McGurk effect paradigm was used to examine the developmental onset of inter-language differences between Japanese and English in auditory-visual speech perception. Participants were asked to identify syllables in audiovisual (with congruent or discrepant auditory and visual components), audio-only, and video-only presentations at various…

The purposes of this study were to clarify how social problem-solving processes develop and to identify developmentally-sensitive intervention components for children's aggression. Elementary and junior-high school Japanese students (N = 1100) from urban public schools participated in the present investigation. Their alternative thinking skills,…

A total of 467 mothers of firstborn 20-month-old children from 7 countries (103 Argentine, 61 Belgian, 39 Israeli, 78 Italian, 57 Japanese, 69 Korean, and 60 US American) completed the "Jackson Personality Inventory" (JPI), measures of parenting cognitions (self-perceptions and knowledge), and a social desirability scale. Our first…

This study investigates 727 parents from China, Japan, and Korea by a self-devised scale and compares the differences in their expectation of early childhood education in cross-cultural backgrounds. The result shows that parents from the three countries have a positive attitude toward their children's development. The main effect of nations on…

This annual report presents several articles related to the work of the Clinical Center for Child Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The articles are: (1) "Joint Attention as a System Property of the Infant-Caregiver Interaction System"(Tsuneda Miho and Shing-Jen Chen); (2) "Age-Related Change in Japanese Maternal…

Two studies investigated behavioral problems in childhood. Study 1 longitudinally investigated similarities and differences in enuresis and nailbiting among Japanese and American children. Incidences of enuresis decreased as subjects' age increased. Socio-cultural and family tolerance were related to incidences of nailbiting. In Study 2, changes…

This annual report discusses several topics related to the work of the Clinical Center for Child Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The articles are: (1) "The Study of Mothers' Parenting Practices with Child's Withdrawn Behaviors and Temperament" (Sueko Toda); (2) "Structure, Developmental Change, and Sex…