Developmental trends in children’s typicality judgments

Category typicality norms from 12 natural language categories are presented for kindergarten, third-grade, sixth-grade, and college students. Subjects first selected examples of familiar word concepts and rated them on a 3-point scale in terms of category typicality. Age differences in the percentage of items included as category members were found primarily for the less typical items, with inclusion rates varying as a function of both age and typicality level. The absolute level of typicality judgments increased with age, although correlations between the children’s and college students’ ratings were generally significant for all three children’s groups, with average correlations increasing somewhat with age. It was suggested that the rating data would be useful to developmental investigators interested in children’s processing of category information.     

Women and Leadership: A Developmental Paradox?

In this article, the author explores the nature of leadership from a gendered perspective, specifically addressing leadership challenges for women. Leadership challenges, gender stereotypes, and definitions of leadership are discussed. Recommendations for professional redefinition of leadership within the counseling profession and strategies for successful negotiation of leadership roles are provided.     

Developmental changes in retention: Independent of age?

It is commonly believed that age differences in memory are due primarily to input processes and secondarily, if at all, to retention processes. The present study examined this belief with a test-retest paradigm, varying rehearsal conditions orthogonal to age (first- and second-graders vs. college students). Large age effects were found for both original learning and retention, and these effects were independent of rehearsal conditions. An estimate of the relative magnitude of each suggested that age effects on retention were about half as large as age effects on original learning (e.g., input).     

Developmental differences in recall: Encoding or retrieval?

First- and fifth-grade children and college adults (ages 6, 10, and 18 years, respectively) were presented a 30-item set of pictures to recall in a 4-trial study-test procedure. The stimuli were presented in one of three ways (encoding condition): randomly, blocked (according to categories), or sort (the subject was given the stimuli in random order and asked to sort them into categories). Recall was either free, cued, or constrained (retrieval condition). Results indicated that maximum adult recall was a function of the interaction of encoding and retrieval conditions, and that first- and fifth-grader's recall was influenced by retrieval conditions but not by encoding conditions. The blocked and sort encoding conditions did result in increased clustering relative to random encoding at all three ages, however. It was concluded that encoding conditions influence recall only as they effect the use of retrieval strategies.     

The Ecological Self: Metaphor and Developmental Experience?

The term ecological self, used within the fields of deep ecology and ecopsychology, is considered here from the viewpoint of developmental research and theory, within the context of contemporary relational psychoanalysis. Both developmental theory and more specifically our concept of health are explored with the inclusion of relatedness to the nonhuman world and an emphasis on embodiment and interactive experience. Illustrations and examples are drawn from research, clinical work with adults and the literature of natural history.     

A Developmental Explanation For Children’s Motor behavior

Two experiments were conducted to test the application of Pascual-Leone’s (1970) neo-Piagetian theory for explaining children’s acquisition of skill in a curvilinear positioning task. Two groups of children (late pre-operational 6 yr olds and early concrete 8 yr olds) were identified and from each group 10 low M-processors and 10 high M-processors were selected (total n=40) through use of the Children’s Embedded Figures Test. The 6 yr olds were administered 2-and 3-scheme curvilinear positioning tasks while the 8 yr olds performed 3-and 4-scheme tasks. The difference between the two experiments was the nature of the positioning tasks, i.e., one task allowed visual processing of information, while the other did not. Both experiments supported the neo-Piagetian predictions of structural mental space as explaining the developmental nature of motor skill acquisition, and functional mental space as explaining individual differences within stages in children’s performance.     

Developmental differences in children’s interpersonal emotion regulation

Previous research on interpersonal emotion regulation (ER) in childhood has been rather unsystematic, focusing mainly on children’s prosocial behaviour, and has been conducted in the absence of an integrative emotion theoretical framework. The present research relied on the interpersonal affect classification proposed by Niven et al. (Emotion, 9:498–509, 2009) to investigate children’s use of different interpersonal ER strategies. The study drew on two samples: 180 parents of children aged between 3 and 8 years reported about a situation where their child was able to change what another person was feeling in order to make them feel better. In addition, 126 children between 3- and 8-years old answered two questions about how they could improve others’ mood. Results from both samples showed age differences in children’s use of interpersonal ER strategies. As expected, ‘affective engagement’ (i.e., focusing on the person or the problem) and ‘cognitive engagement’ (i.e., appraising the situation from a different perspective) were mainly used by 7–8 years-old, whereas ‘attention’ (i.e., distracting and valuing) was most used by 3–4 and 5–6 years-old. ‘Humor’ (i.e., laughing with the target) remained stable across the different age groups. The present research provides more information about the developmental patterns for each specific interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.     

Developmental continuity? Crawling,cruising, and walking

This research examined developmental continuity between "cruising" (moving sideways holding onto furniture for support) and walking. Because cruising and walking involve locomotion in an upright posture, researchers have assumed that cruising is functionally related to walking. Study 1 showed that most infants crawl and cruise concurrently prior to walking, amassing several weeks of experience with both skills. Study 2 showed that cruising infants perceive affordances for locomotion over an adjustable gap in a handrail used for manual support, but despite weeks of cruising experience, cruisers are largely oblivious to the dangers of gaps in the floor beneath their feet. Study 3 replicated the floor-gap findings for infants taking their first independent walking steps, and showed that new walkers also misperceive affordances for locomoting between gaps in a handrail. The findings suggest that weeks of cruising do not teach infants a basic fact about walking: the necessity of a floor to support their body. Moreover, this research demonstrated that developmental milestones that are temporally contiguous and structurally similar might have important functional discontinuities.     

Introduction: Developmental Processes in Adulthood—European Research Perspectives

The main objective of this Special European Issue is to investigate some topical aspects of recent research on adult development in Europe. More specifically, the issue offers a detailed discussion of questions involved in complex forms of adult cognition, scientific thinking, responses to the demands of everyday life, the effects of various life events on well-being, and the construction of an integrated model of the cognitive, social, and personality domains. Theo- retically, the articles are based on various viewpoints such as the neo-Piagetian perspectives on thinking, although others have connections with the Vygotskian approach to learning. In conclusion, we assert that the developmental processes of adulthood should always be viewed multidimensionally, contextually, and holistically, as the articles themselves clearly demonstrate.     

Developmental changes in conditional reasoning: Linguistic or logical?

This study investigated reasoning with abstract conditional sentences as a function of age. Subjects from third-grade to eleventh-grade were required to evaluate the conclusion of several conditional arguments. The results confirmed the previously established finding that performance improves with age, particularly between 11 and 15 years. This finding could be interpreted to indicate that individuals become more logical as they get older. However, another possible interpretation is that the meaning of a conditional sentence like pthenq for naive Ss may not always be given by the truth function pq true, $\text{p}\text{q}$ false, $\text{p}\text{q}$ true, and $\text{p}\text{q}$ true. Further analysis suggested that at 9 years individuals treat the connective in the sentence, ifpthenq, as if it were either a conjunctive or a biconditional, that the conjunctive meaning disappears with increasing age and after 13 years is gradually superceded by the conditional.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

How European is the European Journal of Developmental Psychology?

This paper tries to make clear why a European journal of developmental psychology makes sense. First it is explained that so-called European culture is a complicated matter: historically and culturally many fault lines are to be detected, from the borders of the Roman empire to the iron curtain. These fault lines separate different cultural areas within Europe.

Developmental thinking came into existence within the eighteenth century (Enlightenment), especially with the work of Rousseau, which offered the theoretical building blocks for Western education and for modern Piagetian developmental psychology. Empirical developmental research found its origins in Germany, especially in Jena, with the work of William Preyer. The Jena ideas were brought to the USA by Stanley Hall. And in the twentieth century the Rousseau–Piaget tradition was brought to the USA by John Flavell.

A European Society for Developmental Psychology and its flagship the European Journal of Developmental Psychology should devote itself to the study of the European roots of developmental psychology as well as contributing to European developmental psychology, which in an open, new Europe moves across the original fault lines.     

Developing Together: Parents Meeting Children��s Developmental Imperatives

It is well known that the parent influences the child, but few realize how much the child changes the adult. This paper reports research that explored how adults change when they learn to nurture their child??s developmental needs. It also explores how empathy with the child impacts an adult??s ability to move through his or her own unresolved childhood issues into new meaning and relationships. Using qualitative methods and quantitative measures, the research captures perspectives of 20 parents about their own development from using child development principles. Analysis resulted in the identification of five themes: (a) cognitive development in perspective, differentiation from past ways, and new meaning-making; (b) emotional development of trust, empathy, and affective complexity; (c) personal agency of intentional effort and use of critical self-inquiry; (d) adult well-being; and (e) emergence of wisdom. More research is needed to determine the association between child development competence and adult development.     

Developmental changes in the structural complexity of children’s riddles

Riddles were collected from 156 boys and girls from Years 1 to 6 (six- to twelve-year-olds) of a large, middle-class school. The riddles were scored on nine measures of structural complexity based on the presence of incongruity or linguistic devices in the question and answer of the riddle. The number of riddles increased from Year 1 to Year 5 and then declined slightly in Year 6. Grade differences were found for five of the nine complexity measures, and girls tended to tell riddles with greater total complexity than boys. Production data are compared with the preference data from other studies, and grade changes in riddle structure and content are discussed in terms of a search for novelty which finally leads to the more flexible structure of the joke.     

Item-Position Effect in Raven’s Matrices: A Developmental Perspective

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether there is a developmental difference in the emergence of an item-position effect in intelligence testing. The item-position effect describes the dependency of the item’s characteristics on the positions of the items and is explained by learning. Data on fluid intelligence measured by Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) and data on working memory tasks were collected from both primary school age children (7–8 years old) and secondary school age adolescents (12–13 years old). The item-position effect of SPM was represented and separated from the ability component by the fixed-links model. The results indicated a clear age difference: whereas the item-position effect was observed in the adolescents, it was not found in the primary school children. In addition, separating the item-position effect detected in the adolescents from the ability component led to a larger correlation with working memory than otherwise. These results suggest that age differences in intelligence test performance may not only reflect differences in the general ability but also in the sources of the item-position effect.     

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: same or different?

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) were for many years treated as distinct disorders but are now often regarded as different manifestations of the same underlying problem, differing only in severity or developmental stage. The merging of these categories has been motivated by the reconceptualization of dyslexia as a language disorder in which phonological processing is deficient. The authors argue that this focus underestimates the independent influence of semantic and syntactic deficits, which are widespread in SLI and which affect reading comprehension and impair attainment of fluent reading in adolescence. The authors suggest that 2 dimensions of impairment are needed to conceptualize the relationship between these disorders and to capture phenotypic features that are important for identifying neurobiologically and etiologically coherent subgroups.     

Developmental differences in working memory: Where do they come from?

Several models assume that working memory development depends on age-related increases in efficiency and speed of processing. However, age-related increases in the efficiency of the mechanisms that counteract forgetting and restore memory traces may also be important. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments by manipulating both the processing duration within a working memory task and the time available to restore memory traces. Third- and sixth-grade children performed a complex span task in which they maintained series of letters while adding numbers to series of digits. When we equated processing and restoration times between ages, the developmental difference in working memory span was reduced but remained significant. However, this residual difference was eliminated when the time available to reactivate memory traces was tailored to the processing speed of each age group. This indicates that children employ active mechanisms for maintenance and restoration of memory traces that develop with age.     

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children’s Word and Character Reading

To investigate the relationship between Chinese children’s character and word reading, 62 third and 50 fifth grade children in Hong Kong were asked to read single characters and words that were comprised of these characters. Results showed that words helped children to recognize characters for both grades of children. Compared to older children, younger children’s character reading was more likely to rely on the word that the character appeared in as a component; younger children made more errors in confusing the correct character with words related to it. Younger children’s greater rate of meaning-related errors also underscored the role of the word in their character learning. This study confirmed the important role of words in children’s character learning, and provided evidence for a developmental pattern of character and word reading in Chinese.     

Are Causal Structure and Intervention Judgments Inextricably Linked? A Developmental Study

The application of the formal framework of causal Bayesian Networks to children’s causal learning provides the motivation to examine the link between judgments about the causal structure of a system, and the ability to make inferences about interventions on components of the system. Three experiments examined whether children are able to make correct inferences about interventions on different causal structures. The first two experiments examined whether children’s causal structure and intervention judgments were consistent with one another. In Experiment 1, children aged between 4 and 8 years made causal structure judgments on a three‐component causal system followed by counterfactual intervention judgments. In Experiment 2, children’s causal structure judgments were followed by intervention judgments phrased as future hypotheticals. In Experiment 3, we explicitly told children what the correct causal structure was and asked them to make intervention judgments. The results of the three experiments suggest that the representations that support causal structure judgments do not easily support simple judgments about interventions in children. We discuss our findings in light of strong interventionist claims that the two types of judgments should be closely linked.