Previous research has demonstrated how children develop the ability to use notational representations to indicate simple quantities. These studies have shown a developmental shift from the use of idiosyncratic, to analogical, to conventional, numerical notations. The present paper extends these findings by reporting the results from a study in which children from 3 to 7 years old were asked to write a representation to indicate a quantity presented in a game-like scenario. Three kinds of quantities were included: whole numbers, zeros, and fractions. The children's notations were shown to them shortly after they were produced and then again two weeks later to see if children could interpret them. The results showed the familiar developmental pattern towards increased use of conventional notations for all quantities. The ability to read the notations was greatest for conventional numbers where performance was at ceiling, lower for analogue representations, and very poor for idiosyncratic global recordings. Children's choice of a notational format was influenced almost entirely by their age and not by the quantity being represented. Children were able to solve the zero problems almost as well as they could the whole numbers, but their understanding and use of representations for fractions was very limited.

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Preschool children bilingual in English and Hebrew were investigated for their understanding of concepts of print by means of two tasks. In the first, children had to understand that a printed word did not change its meaning if it moved to a new location. In the second, children had to make judgments about word length and ignore the size of the named objects. Previous research had shown bilingual French-English and Chinese-English children to excel in the first task, but only older Chinese-English bilinguals had an advantage in the second. The present study extended those results by investigating the effect of writing system in more detail. The study also examined the effect of the language of the environment by conducting parallel studies in environments in which either English or Hebrew was the community language. The results show that the bilingual children in both settings were more advanced than the monolinguals in both tasks and in both settings.

Children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults were asked to determine the location for top and front of an object. They listened to a verbal description and then positioned a given object (referent object) to indicate the intended top or front relation of another object (relatum object). The descriptions were ambiguous in that each could refer to two different locations. The location could be determined by the intrinsic structure of the relatum object or the extrinsic position of that object in space. Three features of the description were examined for their role in determining the spatial reference: the object being described (relatum), the kind of object used to indicate the top or front relation (referent), and the presence of the definite article in the description (predicate). There were two main results. First, descriptions of front were generally interpreted intrinsically while descriptions of top were generally interpreted extrinsically. Intrinsic interpretations of top, however, increased as a function of the three features examined. Second, the three features became relevant for determining top at different ages. All subjects attended to properties of the object relatum, 5‐year‐old children attended as well to the object referent, and oldest children and adults additionally considered the presence of the definite article in the predicate.