Exploring sex differences in the emotional content of mother-child conversations about the past

In this study, the ways in which mothers and their 30–35-month-old children discussed the emotional aspects of past experiences was explored. Although previous research has established that children this age talk about emotions, and some studies have found sex differences between mother-daughter and mother-son dyads in these conversations, no study has examined explicitly the way in which emotions about the past are discussed. This is an important research question because emotional aspects of events may help provide an evaluative framework for thinking about and talking about the past. The results suggest that, with daughters, mothers focus more on positive emotions and tend not to attribute negative emotions to the child. With sons, positive and negative emotions are discussed equally. Moreover, mothers never discuss anger with their daughters but they do with their sons. Finally, mother-daughter conversations emphasize the emotional state itself, whereas mother-son conversations often discuss the causes and consequences of emotions. The way in which these patterns might contribute to children's developing understanding of gender-appropriate emotional reactions are discussed.     

The early development of empathy: Self-regulation and individual differences in the first year

A longitudinal study of 45 mothers and their first-born infants was conducted to identify developmentally meaningful, individual differences in children's primitive empathic responding at 12 months of age, and to determine whether differences in self-regulatory skills assessed at 4 months might underlie any differences in empathic responding observed. Personal distress responses analogous to those observed in older children and adults were identified in one-third of the sample at 12 months of age. These distress responses were associated with indices of poorer self-regulatory skills in social contexts at 4 months of age. The results are interpreted within the broader framework of the development of self-regulatory strategies in the early childhood years.This research was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council, the National Research Fellowship Scheme, and the Macquarie University Research Grant Scheme. We thank Judy Chan, Alison Malbourne, Sylvana Sturevska, and Lorraine Smith for their assistance in data collection and analysis.     

Theories of early language acquisition

What features of brain processing and neural development support linguistic development in young children? To what extent is the profile and timing of linguistic development in young children determined by a pre-ordained genetic programme? Does the environment play a crucial role in determining the patterns of change observed in children growing up? Recent experimental, neuroimaging and computational studies of developmental change in children promise to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the brain becomes wired up for language. In this review, the muttidisciplinary perspectives of cognitive neuroscience, experimental psycholinguistics and neural network modelling are brought to bear on four distinct areas in the study of language acquisition: early speech perception, word recognition, word learning and the acquisition of grammatical inflections. It is suggested that each area demonstrates how linguistic development can be driven by the interaction of general learning mechanisms, highly sensitive to particular statistical regularities in the input, with a richly structured environment which provides the necessary ingredients for the emergence of linguistic representations that support mature language processing. Similar epigenetic principles, guiding the emergence of linguistic structure, apply to all these domains, offering insights into phenomena ranging from the precocity of young infant's sensitivity to speech contrasts to the complexities of the problem facing the young child learning the arabic plural.     

Young Children′s Event Recall: Are Memories Constructed through Discourse?

The ways in which event memories may be reconstructed or transformed through discussion with others is a critical question both for understanding basic memory processes and for issues concerning legal testimony. In this research, white middle-class preschool children were interviewed first by their mothers and then by a female experimenter about personally experienced events when they were 40, 46, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses indicated that at all four time points children only incorporated about 9% of the information initially recounted by the mother into their independent recall of the event with the experimenter. Moreover, children only repeated about 20% of the information they themselves recalled across the two interviews. Additional analyses indicated that information mutually discussed by the mother and child was no more likely to be incorporated or repeated when recalling the event with the experimenter than information not mutually discussed. These results indicate that young children′s personal memories are not so fragile that they easily incorporate information provided by another into their own recall.     

EFFECTS OF EXPLICIT TIMING ON MATHEMATICS PROBLEM COMPLETION RATES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN THIRD-GRADE ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

A multiple baseline design was used to evaluate the effects of Van Houten and Thompson's (1976) explicit timing procedure on problem completion rates and accuracy levels in African-American third-grade students. During the explicit timing phase, students were told that they were being timed and were instructed to circle the last problem completed at each 1-min interval. Results showed that the explicit timing procedure increased problem completion rates. A decreasing trend in percentage of problems correct also occurred. Exploratory data analysis suggested that decreases in accuracy were not caused by the explicit timing procedure and did not occur in students who had attained high levels of preintervention accuracy. Discussion focuses on recommendations for educators who wish to use timing procedures to increase students' rates of accurate responding.     

U-shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: implications for child language acquisition

A three-layer back-propagation network is used to implement a pattern association task in which four types of mapping are learned. These mappings, which are considered analogous to those which characterize the relationship between the stem and past tense forms of English verbs, include arbitrary mappings, identity mappings, vowel changes, and additions of a suffix. The degree of correspondence between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models which learn mappings of this sort (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987) and children's acquisition of inflectional morphology has recently been at issue in discussions of the applicability of PDP models to the study of human cognition and language (Pinker & Mehler, 1989; Bever, in press). In this paper, we explore the capacity of a network to learn these types of mappings, focusing on three major issues. First, we compare the performance of a single-layered perceptron similar to the one used by Rumelhart and McClelland with a multi-layered perceptron. The results suggest that it is unlikely that a single-layered perceptron is capable of finding an adequate solution to the problem of mapping stems and past tense forms in input configurations that are sufficiently analogous to English. Second, we explore the input conditions which determine learning in these networks. Several factors that characterize linguistic input are investigated: (a) the nature of the mapping performed by the network (arbitrary, suffixation, identity, and vowel change); (b) the competition effects that arise when the task demands simultaneous learning of distinct mapping types; (c) the role of the type and token frequency of verb stems; and (d) the influence of phonological subregularities in the irregular verbs. Each of these factors is shown to have selective consequences on both successful and erroneous performance in the network. Third, we outline several types of systems which could result in U-shaped acquisition, and discuss the ways in which learning in multi-layered networks can be seen to capture several characteristics of U-shaped learning in children. In general, these models provide information about the role of input in determining the kinds of errors that a network will produce, including the conditions under which rule-like behavior and U-shaped learning will and will not emerge. The results from all simulations are discussed in light of behavioral data on children's acquisition of the past tense and the validity of drawing conclusions about the acquisition of language from models of this sort.     

Planning in the preschool years: The emergence of plans from general event knowledge

A framework for conceptualizing the relationship between event knowledge and planning is proposed, and two experiments are reported that examined children's ability to draw on event knowledge in planning. Preschool children were asked to plan and execute shopping trips to a pretend grocery store. Half of the children planned for two events on successive trials (Level 1, single-goal planning) and half of the children planned for two events simultaneously (Level 2, multiple-event planning). The amount of external support for planning was also manipulated. In Experiment 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were presented with either a clustered or interleaved display. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds were given adult assistance in plan construction. Results indicated that children's planning becomes more complex and flexible with age. Older children also rely less on external supports for planning. However, when external support was provided, 3- and 4-year-olds displayed higher-level planning abilities. Results are discussed in terms of the roles of event knowledge and external support in the early development of planning skills.