The Roles of Rule Type and Word Term in the Deductive Reasoning of Adults with and without Dyslexia.

Despite its importance to everyday functioning, reasoning is underexplored in developmental dyslexia. The current study investigated verbal deductive reasoning on the Wason selection task, not previously used in dyslexia research despite its well-established pedigree. Reasoning rule was manipulated, with the conditional rules varying in the logical values presented.

Children's Verbal, Visual and Spatial Processing and Storage Abilities: An Analysis of Verbal Comprehension, Reading, Counting and Mathematics.

The importance of working memory (WM) in reading and mathematics performance has been widely studied, with recent research examining the components of WM (i.e., storage and processing) and their roles in these educational outcomes.

Dyslexia and syllogistic reasoning in adults: Differences in strategy usage.

People with dyslexia have been found to prefer spatial over verbal strategies when performing word-based syllogistic reasoning tasks that require self-generated responses. The current research investigated whether this was also the case for pictorially based syllogisms, when responses were required to either concrete or abstract stimuli, and when multiple-choice answers were presented. Adults with and without dyslexia, matched for non-verbal ability, were presented with sets of isomorphic reasoning problems in which the stimuli were either concrete words, abstract words, concrete shapes or abstract pictograms.

Working memory and high-level cognition in children: An analysis of timing and accuracy in complex span tasks.

This study examined working memory (WM) using complex span tasks (CSTs) to improve theoretical understanding of the relationship between WM and high-level cognition (HLC) in children. A total of 92 children aged 7 and 8 years were tested on three computer-paced CSTs and measures of nonverbal reasoning, reading, and mathematics. Processing times in the CSTs were restricted based on individually titrated processing speeds, and performance was compared with participant-led tasks with no time restrictions.

Deductive reasoning in children with specific language impairment.

The diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) requires non-verbal ability to be in the normal range, but little is known regarding the extent to which general reasoning skills are preserved during development. A total of 122 children were tested; 40 SLI, 42 age-matched controls, and 40 younger language-matched controls. Deductive reasoning tasks were given in both verbal and pictorial presentation types, namely the relational inference task and the reduced array selection task (RAST).

Explaining inappropriate strategy selection in a simple reasoning task.

People's strategy selections appear to reflect attempts to maximize performance by selecting the most effective option for a particular task or format. Theories that account for such behaviour will be named rational models of strategy selection. However, it is possible to find instances where people are apparently biased towards using less effective strategies, and such behaviour appears to go against these models.

The role of language in mathematical development: evidence from children with specific language impairments.

A sample (n=48) of eight-year-olds with specific language impairments is compared with age-matched (n=55) and language matched controls (n=55) on a range of tasks designed to test the interdependence of language and mathematical development. Performance across tasks varies substantially in the SLI group, showing profound deficits in production of the count word sequence and basic calculation and significant deficits in understanding of the place-value principle in Hindu-Arabic notation. Only in understanding of arithmetic principles does SLI performance approximate that of age-matched-controls, indicating that principled understanding can develop even where number sequence production and other aspects of number processing are severely compromised.