This study documented children's acquisition of the following critical aspects of alphabet knowledge: letter recitation, naming, printing, and association of letters with sounds and words. These skills were tested for the entire set of upper- and lowercase letters in 188 children whose ages ranged from 2 1/2 to 7 1/2 years. Performance improved with age, at different rates for the different tasks, and the tasks were all highly correlated with one another. The children performed better on upper- than lowercase letters, and there were no sex differences in alphabet acquisition. Rank order correlations showed the degree to which letter difficulty was consistent across the age groups and across the various alphabet tasks.

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Do young elementary school children lack the ability to distinguish between easy-and hard-to-remember events? Children in kindergarten and Grades 2, 4, and 6 were shown a mixed categorical-unrelated list of 18 pictures and were asked to predict which items they would be able to recall. Although kindergarteners significantly overpredicted the number of items they would remember, a signal-detection analysis showed that they were as discriminating as older children at predicting which particular items were memorable (although they did seem to use a more liberal response criterion). Justifications for why particular items were memorable showed increasing reference to item and task characteristics with increasing age. Predictions of others' performance showed strikingly different patterns of justifications depending on whether the target individual was younger or older than the subject.

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