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A longitudinal study lasting 3.5 years was conducted to investigate complex grammar development, focusing on acquisition of the passive and type 3 conditionals, and its relationship with a number of domain-general, domain-specific and environmental factors. 128 children (M = 5 years 10 months) were tested at the beginning and towards the end of each school year starting from Year 1. The administered measures included established tests of fluid intelligence, short-term and working memory, seriation, grammar, vocabulary, literacy and arithmetic, plus newly-developed tests of passive and conditional sentence acquisition, and arithmetic word problem solving. It was demonstrated that grammar acquisition is not complete even when children start Year 4 of primary school (M = 8 years 7 months), when the current study was completed. At that time, 32% of children have not acquired type 3 conditionals and 89% showed no understanding of centre-embedded sentences. However, only 3% showed no passive sentence acquisition. Fluid intelligence, verbal STM and WM, ability to seriate, vocabulary and parental education level were all found to contribute to individual differences in complex grammar acquisition, independently of age differences and, where relevant, independently of non-verbal ability. There were differences between the passives and the conditionals in their relationship to these variables. Complex grammar development was found to be a significant predictor of reading comprehension, spelling and arithmetic performance, independently of age, non-verbal ability, verbal STM and WM. The findings demonstrate the inter-relatedness of higher cognitive functions, particularly domain-general with domain-specific ones. Modularity in its strictest sense (informational encapsulation, functional isolation) is not present in normally developing brains. Educational applications of the results are discussed.

This thesis examines the extent to which ‘Talk or Dialogue’ contributes to children’s cognitive and psychological development when it is experienced through technological devices. The work analyzes some of the sociocultural theories of children’s speech, cognitive learning, psychological functions, sociocultural learning context, dialogic teaching and learning approaches in the classroom, social interaction and the use of social tools. The theory of speech is built on the Vygotskian notion of language as the prime cultural and psychological tool for children’s learning development in a sociocultural environment. Lev S. Vygotsky emphasised that the development of cognitive processes in children includes thinking, reasoning and understanding of a conceptualised social interaction. These processes are core to children’s intellectual learning. Vygotsky and the neo-Vygotskians emphasised the use of Speech, Talk or Dialogue and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) concept in children’s learning development. In the UK, it was evident that the Talk teaching and learning approach (Mercer & Littleton, 2007) contributed effectively to children’s learning achievements. This approach reinforces Talk or Dialogue collaboratively in the classroom with the ZPD concept. The significance of the Talk teaching approach has encouraged this study to examine further children’s speech and the use of technological devices. Hence, a theoretical discourse methodology on children’s Talk or Dialogue was examined for the research outcomes. The aim is to devise a new teaching and learning approach that contributes to the Malaysian children’s intellectual development inside and outside the classroom through the use of Talk or Dialogue. As a result, a Dialogic framework is articulated based on four existing educational theories of children’s speech and learning. This framework is vital to contribute directly to the Malaysia Education Department Blueprint 2013-2025 in promoting children’s intellectual development. For that reason, two approaches are proposed which emphasise children’s psychological functions of perception, attention, sensory motor-operations and memory through the use of Talk and technological devices. These approaches accentuate the ZPD concept between the teachers and children for learning and activity games. This is the study’s contribution to new knowledge.

Causal reasoning is an important part of scientific thinking, and even young children can use causes to explain what they observe and to make predictions. Weight is an interesting type of cause because it is a nonobvious property, and thus is not readily observable. The first research question of my dissertation examines when children use this property as a cause. In Study 1, 2- to 5-year-old children completed three different tasks in which they had to use weight to produce effects; an object displacement task, a balance-scale task, and a tower building task. The children’s use of weight improved with age, with 4- and 5-year-olds showing above-chance performance on all tasks. The younger children’s performance was more variable across tasks, suggesting that the complexity of the problem may influence their use of weight. The second research question is whether children’s use of weight as a cause can be improved. To examine this question, I varied the pedagogical cues that children received on the balance scale task from Study 1. The results of Study 2, indicate that highlighting the different effects of the heavy and light objects improves 3- to 4-year-olds’ performance. However, the results of Study 3 indicate that 2-year-olds did not benefit from even multiple pedagogical cues (contrasting the different effects and providing a verbal description to highlight the weight difference). To sum up, children at age 4 and above showed a general ability to use weight in across causal reasoning tasks. Whether children’s understanding of weight could be improved depended on their age and the cues given.

Children's oral health is an important but often overlooked component of overall health. Tooth decay therefore remains a common phenomenon among children. It is however entirely preventable through early and sustained intervention. The aim of this research was to develop an age-appropriate programme to enhance children's knowledge and awareness of proper dental care. Action research was applied in this research, which was characterized by various cyclical research phases, including planning, reflecting and implementing. The initial phase of the research included a thorough literature investigation and a baseline assessment, consisting of a questionnaire which assessed preschool children's basic knowledge and awareness of proper dental care. Purposive sampling was used to select 52 Afrikaans-speaking children, between the ages of five and seven years, of different preschools. This age group was chosen because children in this developmental phase are at an age where their activity, curiosity and ability to construct a better system for understanding the world, are key to the process of development. The data obtained indicated a moderate level of knowledge and awareness among the participating children. The initial literature study and the baseline data informed the development of an age-appropriate dental care programme, according to Piaget's theory of cognitive development. The different developmental tasks of the identified age group were considered to be very important in the development of an age-appropriate programme and to teach children the basic aspects of proper dental care by using information and activities that are stimulating, creative and challenging. The programme focuses on basic aspects of proper dental care, including the healthy tooth, loss of primary teeth, the importance of primary teeth and development of permanent teeth, the process of tooth decay, diet, different ways of caring for teeth, and visiting the dentist. Parent involvement was also emphasized in the presentation of the programme. Specialist practitioners in the fields of developmental psychology and dentistry were asked to evaluate the newly developed programme. They were asked to focus on four specific areas, namely, general feedback on the questionnaire that was used for the initial baseline assessment, the overall appearance and presentation of the dental care programme, the relevance and appropriateness of the programme and its activities for the specific age group, and suggestions for further adjustments and improvements. Programme evaluation is an important part of the developmental process and contributes to the eventual appropriate and relevance of the intervention. The specialists' evaluation indicated that the programme appears to be a well-designed intervention that could contribute to enhancing preschool children's knowledge and awareness of proper dental care. Suggestions were made to adjust the programme in certain areas to make it more appealing to children and to enhance its appropriateness and relevance. For example it was suggested that the language used in the programme be more consistent. More structure should be added to the programme manual to assist facilitators in presenting it. These suggestions were considered to be valuable in improving the efficacy of the age-appropriate programme and the adjustments were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

A series of studies were conducted with the aim of showing that the Representational Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) can be used a general model of cognitive development. In this thesis, 3 aspects of the RR model were explored. The first set of experiments involved analysing the generalisability of RR levels across tasks in a domain. In an initial study, the levels of the RR model were successfully applied to a balance scale task. Then, in a subsequent study, children’s RR levels on the balance scale task were compared with their RR levels on a balance beam task (see Pine et al, 1999). Children were seen to access the same level of verbal knowledge across both tasks. This suggests that it is verbal knowledge which provides the basis for generalisation of knowledge. The second set of experiments involved a consideration of the RR model in relation to the domain of numeracy. The levels of the RR model were applied to children’s developing representations for the one-to-one and cardinality principles. The RR levels were shown to have utility in predicting children’s openness to different types of “procedurally based” and “conceptually based” teaching interventions, with pre-implicit children benefiting from procedural interventions, and children who have implicit and more advanced representational levels benefiting from conceptual interventions. The final study involved a microgenetic analysis of children’s representational levels on the balance beam task. The findings from this study indicated the importance of a period of stability prior to a cognitive advance, and demonstrated that cognitive advances can be driven by changes in the verbal explanations that are offered, rather than changes in successful performance. This provides support for the mechanism of change proposed by Karmiloff-Smith, 1992. Together, the findings indicate that the RR model provides a useful perspective about the cognitive development of children. In particular, the thesis highlights when children can use the same representations for different tasks in a domain and suggests the mechanism that brings about representational change.

This thesis sought to conceptualise children’s spelling and reading representations in a novel way based upon the implicit-explicit framework proposed by the Representational-Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The children studied were aged 4-7 years. Existing models of spelling and reading (e.g. Frith, 1985, Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2002) describe the developmental process as a series of stages/phases. An alternative approach adopted here is derived from the author’s previous research (Critten et al. 2007). It employs a coding scheme that analyses children’s explanations of and performance on, recognition tasks that reveal varying levels of explicitness in understanding of spelling. In this thesis the levels are empirically validated for both spelling and reading. It begins with an attempt to show that young children represent spelling knowledge implicitly. A longitudinal study then elucidates the developmental trajectory of both spelling and reading over the course of a year demonstrating that changes occur in the explicitness of children’s underlying representations. By comparing the co-development of spelling and reading it was possible to demonstrate that phonological information is often explicitly used first in spelling before reading, lending support to Frith’s (1985) “pace maker” notions. The final study examined how context, previously known to facilitate children’s reading ability can also facilitate their spelling development. This effect occurs not just for reading and spelling performance but for explicit understanding, building on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) that proposes a role for semantic information in successful spelling and reading. These findings are integrated into a proposal for a new model of development: the Spelling and Reading Explicitation Model (SREM). This model postulates that children develop beyond implicit recognition to form “active” explicit representations, accounting for generalisation errors and characterised as being consciously accessible and verbalisable. It proposes that the development of reading and spelling skill is based upon processes of abstraction, interpretation and application of phonological and morphological knowledge.

Purpose - This paper aims to explore how children's developing ability to effectively regulate their emotions influences their consumer behavior. Design/methodology/approach - Working with 80 children and one of their parents, this study used direct observations of child behavior in a task where they needed to regulate their emotions and a survey of parents about their child's emotional development and consumer behavior. The research used quantitative methods to test whether children's emotion regulation predicted parent reported consumer behavior (e.g. purchase requests, parent-child purchase related conflict) via multiple regression analyses. Findings - After controlling for children's age and linguistic competence, the study found that children's ability to control positively valenced emotions predicted consumer behavior. Specifically, children who had more difficulty suppressing joy/happiness were more likely to ask their parents for consumer goods and were more likely to argue with parents about these purchases. Practical implications - Content analyses of commercials targeting children have shown that many of the persuasive appeals used by advertisers are emotionally charged and often feature marketing characters that children find affectively pleasing. These findings suggest that these types of marketing appeals may overwhelm younger children which can lead to conflict with parents. Consequently, marketers and policy makers may want to re-examine the use of such tactics with younger consumers. Originality/value - While the potential link between children's emotional development and consumer behavior has been suggested in theoretical work, this is the first known study to empirically test this theorized relationship.

Thesis advisor: Ellen Winner / Despite the widespread involvement of individuals in drama either as performers or audience members, psychologists know very little about the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting. Acting may provide a powerful lens through which to understand how we understand our own and others' minds. In this dissertation, I review research on theory of mind, empathy, and emotion regulation, show how these three skills are related to acting theory and acting training, and discuss studies I have previously completed demonstrating correlations between skill in acting and skill in theory of mind, empathy, and positive emotion regulation. I then completed four studies. Study 1 was a longitudinal study comparing children (ages 8-10) receiving acting vs. visual arts training over the course of one academic year testing the hypothesis that acting training in childhood is causally related to development of advanced theory of mind, positive emotion regulation, and empathy. Study 1 found that children in acting classes gain in empathy and expression of emotion over a year above children involved in other art forms. Study 2 was a qualitative study designed to determine the kinds of habits of mind taught, explicitly and implicitly, in acting classes for children (ages 8-10). The purpose of Study 2 was to determine the extent to which acting teachers strive to teach theory of mind, empathy, and adaptive emotion regulation in their acting classes. Study 2 found that children in acting classes at this age are taught about physicality and motivation, with no emphasis on empathy or emotion regulation and only a slight emphasis on theory of mind. Study 3 was parallel to Study 1, but with young adolescents, aged 13-15. Study 3 found that adolescents involved in acting classes gain in their empathy, theory of mind acuity, and expressive emotion regulation over the course of a year over and above adolescents involved in other art forms. Study 4 was parallel to Study 2, with acting classes for adolescents. Study 4 found that adolescent acting classes focus on theory of mind and motivation, without any emphasis on empathy or emotion regulation. I conclude by considering the potential impact of this research on our understanding of typical development in theory of mind, empathy, emotion regulation, and on our understanding of individuals deficient in these skills. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.