Published in Developmental psychology
Preschoolers are typically unable to switch sorting rules during the Dimensional Change Card Sort task. One explanation for this phenomenon is attentional inflexibility (Kirkham, Cruess, & Diamond, 2003). In 4 experiments with 3- to 4-year-olds, we tested this hypothesis by examining the influence of dimensional salience on switching performance. R...
Published in Developmental psychology
What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses comp...
Published in Developmental psychology
Musical melodies are recognized on the basis of pitch and temporal relations between consecutive tones. Although some previous evidence (e.g., Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001) points to an absolute-to-relative developmental shift in listeners' perception of pitch, other evidence (e.g., Plantinga & Trainor, 2005; Schellenberg & Trehub, 2003) suggests th...
Published in Developmental psychology
In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds w...
Published in Developmental psychology
The authors examined decreases across the early adolescent years in child reports of perceived support from mothers to determine whether the rate of decline differed as a function of the initial amount of perceived negativity in the mother-child relationship. Participants included a diverse sample of 197 girls and 116 boys who were in the 1st year ...
Published in Developmental psychology
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the development of college students' major selection and whether and how this choice is associated with their developing ethnic identities. Ninety ethnically diverse college students were interviewed in their first, sophomore, and senior years. Mixed-method analyses revealed 5 theoretically consis...
Published in Developmental psychology
We explored two unanswered questions about the role of alcohol use in sexual behavior. First, we considered whether alcohol use temporally precedes and predicts changes in sexual behavior assessed as the number of sexual partners, whether the reverse pattern holds, or whether the association reflects a common, external cause. Second, we assessed wh...
Published in Developmental psychology
Knowledge of child rearing and child development is relevant to parenting and the well-being of children. Using a sociodemographically heterogeneous sample of 268 European American mothers of 2-year-olds, we assessed the state of mothers' parenting knowledge; compared parenting knowledge in groups of mothers who varied in terms of parenthood and so...
Published in Developmental psychology
Prior research findings have been mixed as to whether attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is related to illicit drug use independent of conduct problems (CP). With the current study, the authors add to this literature by investigating the association between trajectories of ADHD symptoms across childhood and adolescence and onset of ill...
Published in Developmental psychology
This study investigated gender differences in the moderating and mediating effects of responses to stress on the association between perceived peer stress and symptoms of psychopathology. A sample of 295 middle school students (63.7% female; M(age) = 12.39 years, SD = 0.99) completed self-report surveys on stress, coping, and behavioral problems. I...
