Recent advances in understanding visual working memory, the limited information held in mind for use in ongoing processing, are extended here to examine auditory working memory development. Research with arrays of visual objects has shown how to distinguish the capacity, in terms of the "number" of objects retained, from the…

Developmental dyslexia is a lifelong impairment affecting 5% to 10% of the population. In French-speaking countries, although a number of standardized tests for dyslexia in children are available, tools suitable to screen for dyslexia in adults are lacking. In this study, we administered the "Alouette" reading test to a normative sample…

Numbers may be manipulated and represented mentally over a compressible number line oriented from left to right. According to numerous studies, one of the primary reasons for dyscalculia is related to improper understanding of the mental number line. Children with dyscalculia usually show difficulty when they have to place Arabic numbers on a…

We investigated processes underlying performance decrements of highly test-anxious persons. Three experiments contrasted conditions that differed in the degree of activation of concepts related to failure. Participants memorized a list of words either containing words related to failure or containing no words related to failure in Experiment 1. In…

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…

This longitudinal study examines the relative importance of counting ability, additive reasoning, and working memory in children's mathematical achievement (calculation and story problem solving). In Hong Kong, 115 Chinese children aged 6 years old participated in 2 waves of assessments (T1 = first grade and T2 = second grade). Multiple regression…

In the Netherlands, Turkish-Dutch children constitute a substantial group of children who learn to speak Dutch at the age of four after they learned to speak Turkish. These children are generally academically less successful. Academic success appears to be affected by both language proficiency and working memory skill. The goal of this study was…

The current study aimed at addressing two issues concerning children's estimation performance: (1) to investigate whether the log-to-linear framework or the proportional judgment framework provided a better explanation of children's estimation patterns, and (2) to examine the consistency of response patterns in different estimation tasks. A sample…

This study investigated whether measures of verbal working memory are less sensitive to children's socioeconomic background than traditional vocabulary measures. Participants were 120 school beginners, divided into high and low socioeconomic groups. The groups contained equal numbers of English first-language and second-language speakers. All were…

This study investigates syntax in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), its parallelism with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its relation to other aspects of cognition. We focus on (1) 3rd person accusative clitic (ACC3) production, a clinical marker of SLI hypothesized to relate to WM, and (2) 1st person accusative clitic (ACC1) production,…

In this paper we investigated the contribution of a dynamic testing procedure, including multiple graduated prompts protocols, in identifying differences in need for instruction of second grade children (N = 120) with arithmetic difficulties. The training was adaptive and prompts were provided according to one of six protocols, each focusing on a…

Problem solving has been a core theme in education for several decades. Educators and policy makers agree on the importance of the role of problem solving skills for school and real life success. A primary purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive abilities on mathematical problem solving performance of elementary…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…

This study contrasted the effects of tutoring, multiple try and no feedback on children's progression in analogy solving and examined individual differences herein. Feedback that includes additional hints or explanations leads to the greatest learning gains in adults. However, children process feedback differently from adults and effective…