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...developmental psychology in the research methods employed reflect traditional differences in the goals of these fields. The study of cognitive and language development has sought primarily to discover the universals of development and their underlying mechanisms, whereas the fields of social and personality development have been more concerned with explaining differences in developmental trajectories and outcomes. selective review of studies of cognitive and language development illustrates this connection between research questions and research methods. It is suggested that as research on cognitive and language development increasingly focuses on individual and group differences, scholars in these fields might profitably make greater use of large-scale longitudinal studies and of person-centered approaches to data analysis.
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A recent query posted on a child language bulletin board asked for nominations of the five most influential studies in the field of psycholinguistics (Ratner, 2005). The developmental studies among the replies included one study of speech perception in 1- and 4-month-olds (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971); one cross-sectional study of speech perception in 7-, 9-, and 11-month-olds, with a longitudinal replication (Werker & Tees, 1984); one cross-sectional study of children's understanding of English morphology from ages 4 to 7 years (Berko, 1958); and one longitudinal study of the spontaneous speech of three children from approximately 1.5 to 3.5 years of age (Brown, 1973). An informal scan of the tables of contents of recent issues of developmental journals similarly suggests that researchers in the fields of cognitive and language development make more use of experiments, of cross-sectional designs, and of small-sample, short-term longitudinal designs and less use of correlational studies and of large-scale, long-term longitudinal designs than do researchers in the fields of personality and social development. Also, the data analyses in studies of cognitive and language development are almost entirely variable-centered; person-centered analyses are the exception. The questions to be addressed here are why this state of affairs exists and whether the fields of cognitive and language development might profitably make greater use of large-scale longitudinal designs and of person-centered approaches to data analysis than they have to date. This article begins with a selective review of the literature that illustrates how longitudinal studies and person-centered analyses have been used in the study of cognitive and language development. Next, the factors that motivate the design choices characteristic of these fields are discussed. A final section offers suggestions for where the fields of cognitive and language development might benefit from increased use of large-scale longitudinal designs and of person-centered analyses in future research.
A Selective Review of Longitudinal Studies and Person-Centered Analyses in the Fields of Cognitive and Language Development
Longitudinal observations of his three children provided the initial descriptive facts that motivated Piaget's account of the origins of intelligence (Piaget, 1952), and the basic descriptive facts about the course of grammatical development found in current textbooks first became known to the field from longitudinal records of a few very small samples of children (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973). Unaggregated longitudinal data (diary studies) have continued to play a role in the study of language development, serving the goals of describing external changes in the study of behavior and providing a basis for theories of the underlying developmental processes (Bowerman, 1985, 1990; Clark, 1993; Dromi, 1987; Tomasello, 1992).
Longitudinal studies have also contributed to identifying core capacities that are common to cognitive performance across ages. For example, longitudinal studies have established that strength of novelty preference and speed of habituation in infancy predict IQ later in childhood (Bornstein & Sigmund, 1986; Fagan & Singer, 1983), that IQ test performance and performance on Piagetian tasks are correlated in childhood (Bjorklund, 1999; Schneider, Perner, Bullock, Stefanek, & Ziegler, 1999), and that declines in speed of processing substantially contribute...
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