Number development in young children

This paper presents new data on children's acquisition of counting skills. Three aspects of counting were studied: the formation of the cardinality rule that the last number named during counting denotes the number of objects in an array, the mastery of the counting procedure or the coordination of ordered number names and objects counted, and the growth of the knowledge that x + 1 is greater than x. A model was outlined which posits the hierarchic integration of six number skills to account for the growth of the knowledge that x + 1 is greater than x and the development of number conservation. The six skills are: the cardinality rule, the counting procedure, acquisition of more x's, judgments of relative numerosity, pattern recognition of small numbers, and one-to-one correspondences.     

Lexical development norms for young children

Developmental norms for young children’s vocabularies have a number of applications in research design, assessment, and intervention, but have previously been very difficult to obtain. In the present study, month-by-month norms for comprehension and production of 396 words from 8 to 16 months, and production of 680 words from 16 to 30 months, were derived from a norming study of 1,789 children between the ages of 8 and 30 months using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1993). The norms are available in the form of a database program, LEX, for MS-DOS-based computers.     

The development of conceptual interests in young children

We conducted a longitudinal analysis of the relative intensity and duration of interests associated with conceptual domains between the ages of 4 and 6 years, respectively. Results indicated a significant portion of preschool children do sustain an interest in conceptual domains during some portion of their childhood. Expected gender differences were found, with boys more likely to express an interest in a conceptual domain than girls. A latent growth curve analysis revealed that the probability of exhibiting a conceptual interest declined as school began, though the rate of that decline was similar for both boys and girls. Potential explanations for the decrease in conceptual interests as school begins are considered.     

Fostering the development of compassion in young children

Conclusion Compassion involves the feeling of emotions which are more appropriate to another's situation than to one's own situation (empathy), along with elements of condolence, pity, and/or agreement (sympathy) resulting in action taken to help or support another (pro-social behavior). The precise relationship among these components of empathy, sympathy, and pro-social behavior remains ambiguous, although their inter-relatedness seems clear. Martin L. Hoffman's theory of the development of empathy in six modes and other empirical research give assurance that the rudiments of empathy, sympathy, and pro-social behavior exist in very young children; this literature informs the practical efforts of parents and educators toward nurturing compassion. Practical strategies thus deemed effective include fostering the emotional bonds between infants and their care-givers, the inducement and rehearsal of pro-social behaviors in day care, preschool, and primary school programs, the use of inductive discipline, the use of appropriate narrative and viewing, and giving attention to the small child's overall environment.     

The development of retrieval strategies in young children

Two incidental memory tasks were given to 3.5–6.5 yr old children to test for an age increase in the tendency to use a simple indirect retrieval strategy when direct retrieval efforts do not suffice. In both tasks, pictures of people were paired with very closely associated toy objects (e.g., farmer—toy tractor), and the indirect retrieval strategy consisted of thinking to use one member of the pair as a cue to the recall of the other, e.g., turning over the visible but facedown pictures and using them as retrieval cues for the toys. Support for the predicted age trend was obtained in one of the two tasks. It was suggested that the development of retrieval skills in children may show some parallels with that of storage skills.     

The development of ordinal numerical competence in young children

Two experiments assessed ordinal numerical knowledge in 2- and 3-year-old children and investigated the relationship between ordinal and verbal numerical knowledge. Children were trained on a 1 vs 2 comparison and then tested with novel numerosities. Stimuli consisted of two trays, each containing a different number of boxes. In Experiment 1, box size was held constant. In Experiment 2, box size was varied such that cumulative surface area was unrelated to number. Results show children as young as 2 years of age make purely numerical discriminations and represent ordinal relations between numerosities as large as 6. Children who lacked any verbal numerical knowledge could not make ordinal judgments. However, once children possessed minimal verbal numerical competence, further knowledge was entirely unrelated to ordinal competence. Number may become a salient dimension as children begin to learn to count. An analog magnitude representation of number may underlie success on the ordinal task.     

Imitation and representational development in young children with Down syndrome

Competence in object search and pretend play are argued to reflect young children's representational abilities and appear delayed in children with Down syndrome relative to social and imitative skills. This paper explores the effects on object search and play of this social strength in children with Down syndrome. Three experiments compared performance on traditional tasks with modified tasks designed to assess the role of imitation in object search and pretend play. Children with Down syndrome, relative to typically‐developing children, were able and willing to imitate hiding actions when no object was hidden (Experiment 1). When imitation was prevented in object search, children with Down syndrome searched less effectively than typically‐developing children (Experiment 2). In play, children with Down syndrome expressed more willingness to imitate a counter‐functional action, modelled by the experimenter, despite apparent competence in spontaneous functional play (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that object search and play behaviours of children with Down syndrome rely more heavily on imitation than is the case for typically‐developing children. The implications for the development of children with Down syndrome and models of representational development are discussed.     

Aspects of grammatical development in young French children with SLI

This paper presents an exploratory study of the spontaneous production of 11 French children clinically diagnosed as specific language impaired (SLI). In a cross‐sectional study of the children under and over 5 years of age, we investigate the production of finite and non‐finite verbal forms, of sentences with overt and null subjects, and of pronominal clitics. A comparison between younger and older children with SLI highlights developmental patterns which parallel normal syntactic development in important respects, though at a slower pace. An area of difficulty which clearly persists for the older group involves the domain of pronominal complement clitics.     

The development of emotional responses to music in young children

Children aged 3 to 4 and 7 to 8 years listened to eight tunes which were either in the major or minor mode and either unaccompanied melody or harmonized. For each tune children selected one of two schematic faces chosen to depict happy or sad facial expressions. Children 7 to 8 years old showed a significant major-happy and minor-sad connotation, which was also shown by adults. However 3 to 4 year-olds did not show any such significant association between musical mode and emotional response. Harmonic accompaniment significantly increased the frequency of happy responses. The results support the idea of a learned association between mode and emotional response. We thank the teachers and children of Mauldeth Road County Primary School and Ladybarn Primary School, Manchester, for their cooperation, and we thank Debra Raye and Daniela Milone for help with testing.     

Character development in adolescents

This study explored the effects of a program consisting of communication and counseling skills, assertiveness training and moral dilemmas on the character development, i.e., moral reasoning, ego development, and assertiveness of high school students. It was hypothesized that exposure to the experimental treatment would enhance the character development of high school students. Fifty-four high school seniors enrolled in three psychology classes were assigned randomly to two treatment groups and one control group. Assessment instruments were the Defining Issues Test, to measure moral reasoning, the Washington University Sentence Completion Test, to measure ego development, and the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule, to measure assertiveness. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to determine significant differences between control and treatment posttest means with respect to the dependent variables--moral reasoning, ego development, and assertiveness. The results demonstrated that the character development of the students in the experimental treatment group was affected significantly over time by the program.     

Trajectories of cognitive development among American Indian young children

Children who begin kindergarten with stronger skills learn faster than do those who enter with lower skills. Minority children tend to enter kindergarten already at a disadvantage, and the gap widens across time. However, little is known about cognitive development among American Indian young children. In this study, 110 American Indian infants from one Northern Plains reservation community were assessed four times between ages 6 months and 36 months, with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning. At 6 months of age, scores were near the national norms; a drop occurred between 6 months and 15 months. Scores then tended to level off below the norms through 36 months. In each domain, we observed a crucial decline over the 1st year of life and relatively little change in the 2nd and 3rd years of life, highlighting the importance of developing culturally syntonic interventions to facilitate cognitive development during the 1st year of life.     

Skill development and cognitive approaches to educating young children

A variety of early childhood education programs have been established in the last decade that differ markedly in their philosophical and theoretical foundations. This article illustrates how distinct foundations are reflected in all program variables in a unified program. Two unified early childhood education programs are contrasted: a skill development program based upon behaviorist theory, and a cognitive growth program based upon cognitive developmental theory. Implications of unified programs for classroom behavior and the school psychologist are discussed.     

Involuntary memory and the development of retrieval skills in young children

An incidental memory paradigm was used to study involuntary encoding processes and voluntary retrieval strategies in children's memory. Preschool (mean age: 4 years, 4 months) and kindergarten (mean age: 5 years, 10 months) children sorted pictures according to their color or category membership, and then received either a recall test (Experiment 1) or a recognition test (Experiment 2). Better retention of category- than color-sorted items was observed for kindergarten children in free recall, preschool and kindergarten children in cued recall, and neither group in recognition. These results were interpreted in terms of the retrieval strategies used by children in each of the memory tasks. The importance of distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary memory processes, and between acquisition and retrieval, in studies of depth-of-processing was emphasized. Developmental differences in performance appear to derive primarily from the role of voluntary search strategies in retrieval, rather than from age differences in involuntary encoding processes.     

Novelty responding and behavioral development in young,developmentally delayed children

This study examined whether or not a measure of information processing ability based on the discrimination of novel and familiar stimuli was related to behavioral development among developmentally-delayed infants. Two samples of handicapped infants were administered multiple measures of visual novelty discrimination and a battery of assessments which were representative of available measures of development in infancy. The results indicated that, as a group, the developmentally delayed infants were capable of discriminating novel and familiar stimuli. Also, correlational analyses indicated that responding to novelty was related to developmental accessment performance in both samples. This finding is consistent with previous data which indicates that novelty response measures are associated with important individual differences in young children.     

Social interaction,social observation,and cognitive development in young children

Eighty first-grade childen were pretested on a variety of conservation tasks. Subjects who were either nonconservers or intermediate conservers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: social interaction, social observation, and individual control. Subjects in the social interaction condition worked collaboratively on conservation tasks with a same sex partner. Subjects in the social observation condition individually observed pairs of subjects working together and control subjects worked individually on conservation tasks. The purpose of the social observation condition was to control for the effects of task relevant information that was expressed during dyadic interactions. All subjects were individually post-tested on conservation tasks that were the same form but different content than the pretest items. Subjects in the social interaction condition had significantly greater cogntive change scores (post-test less pretest) than subjects in the social observation and control conditions. There were no significant differences between change scores of subjects in the latter two conditions. Also, subjects in the social interaction condition gave significantly more novel explanations for conservation judgments than subjects in the social observation condition. These findings supported a socio-cognitive conflict model of cognitive development in young children.     

The development of the concepts of masculinity and femininity in young children

Sex-role concepts in 140 children aged 3 to 7 were assessed by means of an instrument that allowed children to categorize attributes as being characteristic of males only, females only, both males and females, or nobody. The children sorted attributes once for adult peer stimulus figures and once for peer stimulus figures. The relationship of gender conservation to the degree of stereotyping of children's response was also investigated. The overlap children saw between characteristics of males and females increased with age over the age span studied. Girls were less sex-typed than boys, particularly those girls whose mothers were employed. Gender conservation was associated with decreased sex-typing. The tendency of children to assign positive attributes to their own sex and negative attributes to the other sex peaked at age 5. Subjects overall were less sex-typed in their views of adults than peers.     

The development of visual search in infants and very young children.

In two experiments, 90 1- to 3-year-olds were trained in a new nonverbal task to touch a video screen that displayed a unique target resembling a popular television character. The target appeared among varying numbers of distractors that resembled another familiar television character and was either a uniquely colored shape (the feature search task) or a unique color-shape combination (the conjunction search task). Each correct response triggered a sound and produced four animated objects on the screen. Irrespective of age and experimental design (between-subjects or within-subjects), children's reaction time (RT) patterns resembled those obtained from adults in corresponding search tasks: The RT slope for feature search was flat and independent of distractor number, whereas the RT slope for conjunction search increased linearly with distractor number. These results extend visual search effects found with adults to infants and very young children and suggest that the basic perceptual processes underlying visual search are qualitatively invariant over ontogeny.