Children whose fathers were absent for at least 6 months during their first five years of life were more field-dependent and less able to identify correctly changes in subject-object relations in sentence transformations than children whose fathers had not been absent. The 44 children in each group were matched for sex, race, parents' occupations, and education. Mean scores on verbal intelligence for the two groups were not significantly different. There was no difference between the two groups on a measure of self-concept.
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