The aim of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that, compared to typically reading children matched on regular word reading, adults with basic literacy (either adult literacy students or adult basic education students) struggle on phonologically demanding tasks but are relatively performant on orthographic demanding tasks, and hence…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

Literature that investigates the factors underlying arithmetic problem-solving achievement extensively evaluates the cognitive components, such as working memory (WM) and processing speed, at the basis of this acquisition. Recently, studies have shown that also the emotional factors, such as math anxiety (MA), could play a crucial role in the…

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme…

Spelling accuracy and time course was investigated in a sample of 100 Norwegian 6th grade students completing a standardized spelling-to-dictation task. Students responded by keyboard with accurate recordings of response-onset latency (RT) and inter-keypress interval (IKI). We determined effects of a number of child-level cognitive ability…

We examined the effects of an adaptive phonological training program on the enhancement of 3 processing abilities--namely, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological short-term memory--as well as word and pseudoword reading in Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia. We compared an experimental group (n = 20; mean age =…

Research has highlighted the role of working memory and inhibition on the performance of pupils in mathematics. This study was an attempt to look into the relationship between executive function including working memory capacity and inhibition on the one hand and mathematical abilities on the other. 30 primary school students were selected from…

A primary objective of development is to build a knowledge base. To accumulate knowledge over time and experiences, learners must engage in productive processes, going beyond what is explicitly given to generate new knowledge. Though important to accumulating knowledge, these processes are also easily disrupted. Individuals often depend on surface…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

This study investigated whether weakness in using morphological analysis to infer new word meanings during reading is a source of poor text comprehension and the relative importance of psycholinguistic and cognitive factors as contributors of poor text comprehension in English-only and English language learners. Thirty-seven poor comprehenders and…

The effectiveness of an experimental middle school fraction intervention was evaluated. The intervention was centered on the number line and incorporated key principles from the science of learning. Sixth graders (N = 51) who struggled with fraction concepts were randomly assigned at the student level to the experimental intervention (n = 28) or…

Children described as "poor comprehenders" (PCs) have reading comprehension difficulties in spite of adequate word reading abilities. PCs are known to display weakness with semantics and higher-level aspects of oral language, but less is known about their grammatical skills, especially with regard to morphosyntax. The purpose of this…

A group of 50 good readers and a group of 50 poor readers of Grade 5 matched for age and intelligence and selected on the basis of their proficiency in reading comprehension were tested for their competence in word reading and the process of planning at three different levels, namely, perceptual, memory and conceptual in order to study the…

Intellectual abilities are consistently found to be associated to child functioning. To date, however, it is unclear how varying intellectual profiles relate to differential aspects of child functioning. We screened 513 fifth-grade children on their intellectual abilities and selected three groups of gifted children, scoring in the top 10%:…