3 experiments examined the modes of processing used by children and adults in learning family-resemblance categories. The materials were cartoon faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and bugs (Experiment 3) divided into categories that possessed no single defining attributes, but rather several characteristic attributes that were each partially predictive of category membership. The categories were struc...

Recent research shows that even preschoolers are skeptical; they frequently reject claims from other people when the claims conflict with their own perceptions and concepts. Yet, despite their skepticism, both children and adults come to believe in a variety of phenomena that defy their first-hand perceptions and intuitive conceptions of the world. In this review, we explore how children and ad...

This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic sta...

The American educational system currently yields disappointing levels of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) engagement and achievement among students. One way to remedy this may be to increase children's motivation in STEM from an early age. This study examined whether a social cue-being part of an experimental "minimal group"-increases STEM engagement in preschoolers (N = 141; 4...

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children choose to learn from informants who use more complex syntax (passive voice) over informants using more simple syntax (active voice). In Experiment 1 (N = 30), children viewed one informant who consistently used the passive voice and another who used active voice. When learning novel words from the two informants, children were more...

Theoretical analyses of the development of numerical representations suggest that playing linear number board games should enhance young children's numerical knowledge. Consistent with this prediction, playing such a game for roughly 1 hr increased low-income preschoolers' (mean age = 5.4 years) proficiency on 4 diverse numerical tasks: numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, co...

Compliance is often used to describe a situation in which a child completes instructions from adults, and low levels of compliance are a common teacher concern. We conducted a descriptive assessment that showed that compliance was relatively stable for individual children, variable across children, and positively correlated with age. The impact of six antecedent variables (proximity, position, ...

Functional analyses were conducted to identify reinforcers for noncompliance exhibited by 6 young children. Next, the effects of rationales (statements that describe why a child should comply with a caregiver-delivered instruction) were evaluated. In Experiment 1, 3 participants received the rationales immediately after the therapist's instruction. In Experiment 2, 3 additional participants rec...

This study examined whether the predominance of particular themes in maltreated pre-schoolers’ stories about relationships is related to type of maltreatment they experienced. The MacArthur Story Stem Battery was administered to 49 maltreated and 22 non-maltreated children. Children’s representations of self and other were extracted from the resulting stories using the Core Conflictual Relation...

This investigation examined grade as a source of systematic variation in the African American English (AAE) produced by students in preschool through fifth grades. Participants were 400 typically developing African American boys and girls residing in low- or middle-income homes in an urban-fringe community or midsize central city in the metropolitan Detroit area. Between preschoolers and kinder...