Phonological sensitivity at different grain sizes is a good predictor of reading acquisition in all languages. However, prior to any explicit tuition in alphabetic knowledge, phonological sensitivity develops at the larger grain sizes—syllables, onsets, and rimes—in all languages so far studied. There are also developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and reading st...

The experiments described in the lead articles replicate findings from previous studies of development of knowledge about balance scales, add several new findings, and raise four key questions: (a) How can rule use best be assessed? (b) How can we reconcile systematic use of rules with variable use of strategies? (c) When do children begin to use rules? and (d) How do children generate new rule...

Given evidence that silhouette information can be used by adults to form categorical representations at the basic level, four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure were performed to examine whether 3and 4-month-old infants could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes (e.g., global shape and ...

We tested 4to 7-year-old children’s face recognition by manipulating the faces’ configural and featural information and the presence of superfluous paraphernalia. Results indicated that even with only a single 5-s exposure to the target face, most children could use configural and feature cues to make identity judgments. Repeated exposure and experimenter feedback enabled other children to do s...

Needham’s (2001, this issue) new results confirm that young infants draw on experientially derived representations in resolving individuation ambiguities due to shared boundaries between adjacent objects. They extend previous findings in a surprising way: The memory representations that infants draw upon have bound together information about shape, color, and pattern. Our commentary on these im...

This study examined the interaction between speech perception and lexical information among a group of 7-year-old children, of which 26 were poor readers and 36 were good readers. The children’s performance was examined on tasks assessing reading skill, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, and phoneme identification. Although good readers showed clearly defined categorical perception ...

Three-year-olds sometimes look to the correct location but give an incorrect verbal answer in a false belief task. We examined whether correct eye gaze among 3to 5-yearold children indexed unconscious knowledge or low confidence conscious knowledge. Children “bet” counters on where they thought a story character would go. If children were conscious of the knowledge conveyed by their eye gaze th...

Psychology as a profession is remarkably diverse. Different branches of psychology address themselves to different aspects of human functioning, such as cognition, personality, psychophysiology, and psychopathology. Psychologists may be trained to work as clinicians in hospitals, clinics, schools, industry, and private practice; or as re~ searchers in universities, government agencies, or priva...

Two face identification experiments were carried out to study whether and how children (5-year-olds) and adults integrate single facial features to identify faces. Using the paradigm of the Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception each experiment used the same expanded factorial design, with three levels of eyes variations crossed with three levels of mouth variations as well as their corresponding ha...

Counting is often considered to be the coordination of two actions: saying the numberwords and pointing to each object. We report three experiments to test the hypothesis that this coordination requires the use of the central executive (A. D. Baddeley, 1990), and that the cost of coordination decreases with age. Participants were 5and 9-year-old children and adults. At all ages tested, the mani...