ABSTRACT
Used data from 465 premature, low birth weight children representing three major sociocultural groups (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic) to examine the relation between children's home environments and their adaptive social behavior. Results showed low to moderate associations between scores on the HOME Inventory at 1 and 3 years and scores on two measures of adaptive social behavior at 30 to 36 months, the Adaptive Social Behavior Inventory, and observations of mother-child interaction in a structured laboratory situation. Results indicated that responsive, nurturant care at both 1 and 3 years are related to child adaptive social behavior, as are cognitively stimulating experiences and materials. However, canonical correlational analysis indicated that only Acceptance and Variety of Experience, measured at age 3, and Variety of Experience measured at age 1 accounted for independent amounts of variance in adaptive social behavior as perceived by mothers. Also, only sociocultural group status and Learning Materials at 36 months contributed to the prediction of persistence and enthusiasm as observed in the laboratory setting.
Subject(s)
Infant, Low Birth Weight/psychology , Infant, Premature/psychology , Models, Psychological , Social Adjustment , Social Environment , Adult , Child, Preschool , Ethnicity , Female , Humans , Infant, Newborn , Male , Parent-Child Relations , United StatesABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to determine whether children who could recognize a linear order would be able to use this recognition to answer new questions about the linear order. Three-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were trained to choose a series over a nonseries, a series over a series ordered in the opposite direction, or one nonseries over another nonseries. They were also given a standard seriation task. Children could recognize a series before being able to construct one, but recognition of a series was not correlated with construction of a series. Although children did not use the linear order to construct a series, they could use it to make choices between two similar stimuli, only one of which contained a feature identical to the linear order. The comparison between seriation and recognition of one nonseries over another revealed that performance on these two tasks was correlated and that one common feature between them was systematicity, which occurred either in searching for relationships or constructing them.
