Conditional reasoning and the competence-performance issue: A developmental analysis of a training task

Empirical investigations of conditional reasoning have generally found that both children and young adults perform poorly on tasks that require the selection or evaluation of those propositions that test the truth status of conditional statements (if p then q). Earlier work (D. O'Brien & W. F. Overton, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1980, 30, 44–60) suggested that poor performances with these tasks by young adults show improvement following the introduction of evidence that contradicts earlier faulty inferences, and this improvement generalizes to other conditional reasoning tasks. The effects of the contradiction training were not found with younger subjects. The present research is an extension of the contradiction training paradigm. Ten-, fourteen-, and eighteen-year-olds were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement with an evaluation and a conditional syllogism task. Significant improvement in performance was found for the twelfth grade students following the contradiction training, and this generalized across tasks. This effect was not found for the two younger groups. The usual poor performance of the oldest group is considered to be a false negative assessment of their conditional reasoning competency. Further, it is suggested that several correct performances of younger reasoners are false positive assessments of their conditional reasoning competency.     

Developmental effects of typicality and superordinate property dominance on sentence verification

Second graders (mean age, 8 years 3 months), fourth graders (mean age, 10 years 4 months), and adults verified telegraphic sentences with typical or atypical subject nouns and high or low dominant property predicates. The hypothesis tested was that the similarity in the attribute structures of category members to their superordinate prototype should be related to degree of typicality. Adult reaction time and error data supported the prototype model of semantic category structure. Second and fourth graders showed comparable property knowledge to adults, but evidenced different organizational patterns than predicted by the adult model. The results suggest that with development children learn to simultaneously use many attribute dimensions and to abstract the family resemblance structure and relative importance of category properties.     

Microcomputers in schools: Impact on the social life of elementary classrooms

Microcomputers are becoming increasingly available to schools, but little research is available concerning the impact of this technology for children. Two studies were conducted to examine some possible social effects of the use of microcomputers in elementary school classrooms where children are learning to program in LOGO. First, the task-related interaction that children engaged in with each other was observed and recorded in two classrooms (8- to 9-year-old s, and 10- to 11-year-olds) as the children worked on both computer and non-computer tasks. The children in both classrooms were significantly more likely to collaborate with each other when they worked with the computers, when compared with their interaction over other classroom tasks. The second study examined children's perceptions of their peers as resources for help with a variety of classroom tasks. When compared with other work, the computer context was the one where children more consistently identified certain of their peers as resources for help.     

Anxiety and aggression of high and low assertive persons following conflict

This experiment examined changes in anxiety and differences in aggression for high and low assertive women when different degrees of conflict were encountered. As predicted, low assertive women were intially more uneasy or anxious than high assertive women when they were placed in a conflictual situation. When the level of actual conflict was low, the level of anxiety of low assertive women decreased. However, when the actual level of conflict was high the anxiety level of low assertive women remained unchanged. These results were taken as support for the fear of conflict hypothesis which predicted that the reduction in anxiety for low assertive persons is contingent upon whether or not the anticipated conflict is actually encountered. The results also indicated that high assertive women were not significantly more aggressive than low assertive women. This finding provided support for Galassi's position that assertiveness and aggression are distinct concepts.     

Word-by-word analysis of observer agreement utilizing audio and audiovisual techniques

The purpose of this study was to compare audio and audiovisual techniques of analyzing stuttering behavior using a recently developed index of agreement (Young, 1975). Twenty speech pathologists identified moments of stuttering for ten adult stutterers using both audio and audiovisual methods. Although no statistically significant differences existed between the two conditions, the listeners had more difficulty identifying moments of stuttering during the audio condition when mild stutterers were used.     

Imitation in language development: If,when, and why

In order to explore the function of imitation for first language learning, imitative and spontaneous utterances were compared in the naturalistic speech of six children in the course of their development from single-word utterances (when mean length of utterance was essentially 1.0) to the emergence of grammar (when mean length of utterance approached 2.0). The relative extent of imitation, and lexical and grammatical variation in imitative and spontaneous speech were determined. There were inter-subject differences in the extent of imitation, but each child was consistent in the tendency to imitate or not to imitate across time. For those children who imitated, there were both lexical and grammatical differences in imitative and spontaneous speech, and a developmental shift from imitative to spontaneous use of particular words and semantic-syntactic relations between words. The results are discussed as evidence of an active processing of model utterances relative to the contexts in which they occur for information for language learning.