Recent studies have highlighted the importance of ordinality skills in early numerical development. Here, we investigate individual differences in ordering sets of items and suggest that children might also differ in their tendency to spontaneously recognize and use numerical order in everyday situations. This study investigated the individual…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

The use and understanding of ordinal terms (e.g., "first" and "second") is a developmental milestone that has been relatively unexplored in the preschool age range. In the present study, 4- and 5-year-olds watched as a reward was placed in one of three train cars labeled by the experimenter with an ordinal (e.g.,…

Do preschool children appreciate numerical value as an abstract property of a set of objects? We tested the influence of stimulus features such as size, shape, and color on preschool children's developing nonverbal numerical abilities. Children between 3 and 5 years of age were tested on their ability to estimate number when the sizes, shapes, and…

Investigates why young children who cannot seriate on the standard Piagetian task do seriate when given a task that uses different materials. Explores the process by which various levels of seriation ability are achieved. Findings are consistent with information-processing analyses of development but conflict with Piagetian stage theory.…

Investigated the seriation ability of two groups of four-year-old children with differing levels of language functioning. Results indicated that subjects with delayed language development demonstrated a severe delay in seriation ability, while subjects with normally developing language demonstrated seriation ability commensurate with their…

The ability of preschool children to construct and reconstruct ordered sequences was examined in a series of four experiments. Subjects were 42 children aged 3 to 5 years. The conditions under which reconstruction of an arbitrary series of events is possible are described. (Author/GO)

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of sequence relations and the process of mental rotation in four-year-olds. Subjects were 12 preschool children who were tested individually. They were given a State Comparison Task (SCT) in which they were shown pairs of animal pictures, half identical and half mirror images of one another,…

This study demonstrated that 3- and 4-year-old children could locate the next biggest member of a series when they were first directed to locate a terminal member of the array. (SB)

A study was made primarily to investigate attitudes of preschool children toward older and younger people. In addition, the age discrimination ability of preschool children was assessed, and the possible relationship of this ability to performance on a seriation task was explored. Quantity and quality of each child's contact with adults over 60…

This study tested the hypothesized relationship between overt sensorimotor ordering experiences and relational responding in preschool children. (Author/CS)

Strategies young children used to correct errors in nesting seriated cups changed substantially with age, becoming increasingly more flexible and involving more extensive restructuring of the relationships among the cups. The same trend toward increasing flexibility of thought and action also appeared in procedures children used to combine the…

In two experiments, the effects of modeling on multiple seriation and multiple classification skills in preschool children were examined. In the first study, children observed models who demonstrated either multidimensional grouping or ordering. In the second, children received only single classification training on the basis of form, color, or…

Preschool children divided into three age groups were trained in a stimulus-specific and response-specific seriation-of-length behavior in a typical observational learning paradigm. In three treatment conditions information given to subjects was varied; the fourth served as control. Assessment attempted to determine whether rule learning would be…