The aim of the study was to undertake a behavioral investigation of the development of automatic orthographic processing during reading acquisition in French. Following Castles and colleagues' 2007 study ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97," 165-182) and their lexical tuning hypothesis framework, substituted-letter and…

Two experimental training studies with Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil were conducted to investigate whether children benefit from letter name knowledge and phonological awareness in learning letter-sound relations. In Experiment 1, two groups of children were compared. The experimental group was taught the names of letters whose sounds…

This study examined how four domain-specific skills (arithmetic procedural skills, number fact retrieval, place value concept, and number sense) and two domain-general processing skills (working memory and processing speed) may account for Chinese children's mathematics learning difficulties. Children with mathematics difficulties (MD) of two age…

Learning about letters is an important foundation for literacy development. Should children be taught to label letters by conventional names, such as /bi/ for "b", or by sounds, such as /b[inverted e]/? We queried parents and teachers, finding that those in the United States stress letter names with young children, whereas those in…

Culture has been shown to influence the way people apprehend their physical environment. Cognitive orientation is more holistic in East Asian cultures, which emphasize relationships and connectedness among objects in the field, than in Western cultures, which are more prone to focus exclusively on the object and its attributes. We investigated…

Compares the logical abilities of six-year-old children with those of squirrel monkeys by using the five-term transitivity problem. Both binary and triadic versions of the tests were administered in both verbal and nonverbal modes. Children showed response profiles very similar to those of monkeys in all the conditions used. (Author/CI)

A study presented four groups of chess players (child experts and novices, adult experts and novices) with short-term memory tasks involving meaningful and random chess positions, as well as a control board composed of geometric-shaped spaces and pieces. Found that child experts' immediate recall for meaningful chess positions was far superior to…

Evaluates the effectiveness of two components of parent training programs: (1) parents recording their own ignoring and rewarding behavior, and (2) verbal social reinforcement from peers and the consultant. Subjects were 40 parents of children (seven to nine years) with behavior problems. (MP)

Compared spelling procedures of normal and reading-disabled French-speaking children matched for reading achievement. Found that, at the lowest reading level, word frequency effects were absent and phonological context effects on rule application were seen only in normal readers. As reading ability improved, word frequency and phonological context…

In contrast with younger children of the same reading age, reading-disabled (RD) children performed poorly when they were required to independently abstract grapheme-phoneme (g-p) rules and use them to pronounce pseudowords. Results suggest a phonologically based productive deficit which interferes with the learning of g-p rules. (RH)

Presented academically low-, average-, and high-achieving fifth graders with information about animals and assigned students to one of three strategy conditions: elaborative interrogation (EI), repetition, or provided elaboration. Average- and high-achieving EI group students outperformed repetition group students on a test of their memory of the…

Investigated relationships among metamemory, memory behavior, and memory performance of children aged 4 to 6 in two experiments. Results indicated an increase in preschoolers' ability to establish relationships between cues and targets even if these were not highly associated. (RWB)

Examines the development of grapheme-phoneme conversion ability in normal and reading-age matched dyslexic readers. Thirty-six normal readers (mean age 9.5 years) and 18 children diagnosed dyslexic (mean age 12.1 years) served as subjects. (MP)

The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code meta representation contribute…

Reports free and cued recall experiments in which a new model was used to obtain measurements of age changes in storage and retrieval. Participants were 7- and 11-year-olds. Findings concern (1) contributions of storage and retrieval to memory development; (2) effects of errors and successes on memorization; and (3) difficulty of storing and…