ISSN : 1229-0718
Based on the responses of 742 children, from 1st to 6th grade and from large-size city, medium-size city, and agricultural area, on the basic vocabulary synonym tests composed of 1000 items, their vocabulary comprehension was analyzed in terms of a series of variables: grade, sex, region, and part of speech. When it comes to grade variable, discontinuous developmental pattern was found: vocabulary comprehension was continually increased up to 4th grade, decreased at 5th grade, and increase again at 6th grade. It seems that 4th graders show spurt in vocabulary comprehension, excelling 5th graders and showing not much difference from 6th graders. Sex difference in vocabulary comprehension was found in general level in favor of girls over boys. Regional difference was also found in favor of children inhabiting in large-size city over children inhabiting in medium-size city and agricultural area, and children in the latter two regions showed no difference in vocabulary comprehension. With regard to the variable of part of speech, children's comprehension of noun was superior to that of verb and adjective, and those of verb and adjective were not different.
Development of preschool children's understanding of moral and social-conventional rules was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, stories depicting familiar moral and social-conventional transgressions were presented. Preschoolers were asked to judge permissibility, seriousness, generalizability and rule-contingency of the transgressions. 3- and 5-year-olds distinguished moral and social-conventional rules only on the criterion of seriousness: They judged moral transgressions to be worse than social-conventional ones. In Experiment 2, preschoolers were asked to judge seriousness, authority-contingency, rule-contingency, and generalizability of the same transgressions presented in Experiment 1. Questions for criterion judgements were modified to be more understandable to the subjects. 3- and 5-year-olds distinguished moral and social-conventional rules only on the criteria of seriousness and generalizability: They judged moral transgressions to be worse and to be more generalizably wrong than social-conventional ones.
The goals of the present studies are to investigate the correlation between impulsivity, aggression and violent behavior, and the differences in the level of violent behavior, impulsivity and aggression among adolescents. The subjects for this study were 825 students attending three middle and high schools and 159 juvenile delinquents in C city. The subjects were asked to rate the self-report questionnaire concerned with impulsivity, aggression and violent behavior. As the results, the correlations of the levels of impulsivity, aggression and violent behavior were significant, especially significant in juvenile delinquent group as a pose to the normal adolescent group. Generally, the levels of violent behavior were higher in the high group than in the low group in the levels of impulsivity and aggression. The levels of violent behavior were higher in the high graders than in the low graders in the normal adolescent group, but were not different between grades in the juvenile delinquent group. Also, the levels of violent behavior were higher in the adolescent boys than with girls.
The purpose of this study, as a following study of the pilot test which develop preschool children's daily stress scale, is to develop final items for scale development and verify its reliability and validity. From the pilot test, "experience anxiety-distress*7, "hurt pri.de"，and "encounter criticized-violent situation" were found as three factors and 31 items were already selected.. Using the same method as the pilot test, the finally selected final 31 items were tested by 550 preschool children (age 3-6). The teachers of those children's were asked to observe their students' behavior and provide their professional evaluation. The reliability of the scale was the total a =.80 and the calculation for each factor was .62, .68, and .66, respectively. To verify the validity of the scale, content validity, construct validity, and criteria-related(concurrent) validity were tested. The content validity was verified several times by professional. Factor analysis, t-test were used to verify construct validity and factor analysis was proved to be similar to that of the pilot test which resulted in the same three factors and the number of items was further adjusted to 23, and the total explained-variable value was 79.73%. Inter-factor correlation for the three factors was measured at .45, .52, and .26, respectively. To verify the content validity of the scale, the t-test was conducted between a group of/ children from normal-family preschool children group and a group of children from single-parent preschool children group, and the difference between a group of children who showed normal-children group and a group of children who showed clinical-children group, and the result was significant(p<.001, p<.01). This study was significant in that this was the first preschool children's daily stress scale developed yet in Korea with the direct response and input from Korean preschool children. Further study and research to re-verify the scale developed by this study may be necessary. Also, more field testing of the scale developed by this study through a greater number of preschool children is needed to achieve the standardization of the newly developed scale.
The relative strength of role of linguistic inputs and cognitive constraints in the lexical acquisition was debated(Gopnik and Choi, 1990, 1995; Au et al, 1994), especially in Korean. The Korean has been used because of the prevalence and salience of verbs in the input. In this study, early words from 3 Korean children between 18 to 23 months were recorded for 6 months and they were analyzed by category, type, and token. Adults' linguistic input to these children were also recorded. The results clearly supported the cognitive constraints view. Regardless of situational context and analysis methods, more nouns than verbs were recorded in these children's early vocabularies. On the other hand, more verbs than nouns were recorded in the parents' linguistic inputs. These results suggest that constraints on word meanings, more so than natural variations in input, are important for explaining basic patterns of semantic development across languages. The implication of these results were further discussed.
This research examined the influence of working memory and the type of reasoning task on the performance of children's relational reasoning task. The subjects were 100 children in each age group, 8-year-oid, 10-year-old, and 12-year-old. The subject's working memory was measured by backward digit span and reading span tasks. The solution of the relational reasoning task of each subject was measured in terms of reasoning task of four types. The experimental design of this study was 3(age) × 2(working memory level) × 4(types of reasoning task). The collect data was analyzed by ANOVA and simlpe main effect analysis. The results were shown as follow; First, the performance of children's relational reasoning task increased with age. Second, the reasoning task type affected the performance of children's relational reasoning task. Third, the working memory level affected the performance of children's relational reasoning task.
This study is to verify whether the Attachment Style Questionnaire developed by Feeney, Noller & Hanrahan(1994) can be a attachment measure suitable for Korean adolescents or not. Reliability data were collected on this 40-item measure. For validity confirmatory factor analysis and discriminant-function analysis were carried out. Also the relationship of the three-category and four-category attachment scale with the Attachment Style Questionnaire was analyzed through one-way ANOVA. Results tend to suggest that the Attachment Style Questionnaire is not suitable for Korean adolescents without modification of items in Need for Approval factor and Preoccupation with Relationships factor.
The purpose of this review was to examine the exact course of the development of face recognition. The focus of discussion was on the issue concerning the occurrence of a developmental "dip" in the young adolescent period. Findings from relevant studies showed that recognition of faces improves with age from about five years to adulthood. However, available data do not allow an unambiguous conclusions to be drawn on the existence of the dip. A dip in performance was found to be significant in some experiments, but not in others, and in still others a plateau rather than an actual decline in performance was obtained. This inconsistency across the results of studies raises question of whether the appearance of a developmental dip is a genuine and reliable phenomenon. The possibility discussed was that the variability in the size and onset of the dips is an artifact arising from differences in the pubertal status or in the timing of an encoding transition across subjects.
This study was performed to examine the role of potential recipient's characteristics (liked, disliked, and unknown) in young children's prosocial responding (intentional, voluntary behavior that benefits another). Seventy-eight preschool children attending one of the three preschools in Arizona State University took part in this study. The subjects were asked to name one child who he/she either (a) likes to play with a lot; (b) does not like to play with at all; or (c) a name of a child who he/she doesn't know was provided. Next, the children were left alone in a room for five minutes to either play with a puzzle game or to complete a boring task (i.e., folding papers) for a prize. During the five minute play period, children were given an opportunity to share their prize with another child (liked, disliked, unknown) by putting their own folded papers into another child's prize box. Results show that children shared their prize most with liked friend and shared least with disliked.