Mastering single-digit arithmetic during school years is commonly thought to depend upon an increasing reliance on verbally memorized facts. An alternative model, however, posits that fluency in single-digit arithmetic might also be achieved via the increasing use of efficient calculation procedures. To test between these hypotheses, we used a…

Neural changes related to the learning of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using fMRI. We examined the item-specific learning effects for trained characters and the generalization of phonetic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a phonetic radical (part of a character that gives a clue to the…

Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9-15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in…

Age-related differences (9- to 15-year-olds) in the neural correlates of mapping from phonology to orthography were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were asked to determine if two spoken words had the same spelling for the rime (corresponding letters after the first consonant or consonant cluster). Some of…

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain-behavior correlations in a group of 16 children (9- to 12-year-olds). Activation was measured during a semantic judgment task presented in either the visual or auditory modality that required the individual to determine whether a final word was related in meaning to one…

The importance of cognitive internal state words in skilled reading comprehension was studied with 31 5th graders, 32 7th graders, and 10th graders. Positive correlations with cognitive word knowledge were significantly higher for verbal than quantitative achievement percentiles. The order of cognitive word acquisition depends on complex factors.…