According to the Common Core Standards Initiative (2024), the English Language Arts writing standards (ELA-WS) are challenging standards designed to ensure mastery of literacy and writing skills. These standards require students to produce written work and images, skills that are reliant on motor development of fine motor and visual motor skills.…

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and…

Research has consistently shown that difficulties in facial emotion recognition (FER) are associated with peer problems and internalizing symptoms during middle childhood. However, no longitudinal research has investigated the direction of effects, that is, how these constructs influence each other across time. In this preregistered three-wave…

The emergence of visual cortex specialization for culturally acquired characters like letters and digits, both arbitrary shapes related to specific cognitive domains, is yet unclear. Here, 20 young children (6.12 years old) were tested with a frequency-tagging paradigm coupled with electroencephalogram recordings to assess discrimination responses…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

Visual processes in Grade 1 were examined for their predictive influences in nonalphanumeric and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN) in 51 poor early and 69 typical readers. In a lagged design, children were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3 over 5 testing occasions. RAN outcomes in early Grade 2 were predicted by speeded and nonspeeded…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

This article describes a study to determine the effect of presentation mode and letter similarity on visual discrimination learning and to determine what effect the differential initial learning conditions have on subsequent paired associate learning. (PD)

Describes procedures, results, and conclusions of a study designed to determine the resemblance sorting ability of a non-random sample of 120 first grade students. Results indicate that (a) shape is visually an easier attribute to handle than pattern, and pattern is easier than size, (b) a single attribute is easier than two or three, and (c)…

THE USE OF THE OPAQUE PROJECTOR SEEMS TO BE AN EFFECTIVE AID FOR DEVELOPING GOOD VISUAL DISCRIMINATION, LANGUAGE AWARENESS AND READING SKILLS IN IMAGERY FORMATION, SPEED, PHRASING, INTONATION AND EYE MOVEMENT. IT SHOULD BE PART OF A WELL-ROUNDED PROGRAM INCLUDING THE RECOGNIZED TECHNIQUES FOR TEACHING CULTURALLY DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN. READING…

Suggests methods and materials for improving the perception abilities of young children. (NH)

Because of the increasing use of color in instructional materials at the level of the primary grades, the Health Service Department of the Denver Public Schools became interested in investigating the color vision of 5- and 6-year-olds. A project was established to create color-vision testing methods and to use those methods to ascertain incidence…

The purpose of this experiment was to present redundant auditory information along with written displays to see if first graders would be aided in discrimination between legal and illegal nonwords. Seventy-two middle-class first and second graders of both sexes were given one of three treatments to study the effect of redundant auditory…