Acquisition of new arithmetic skills based on prior arithmetic skills: A cross-sectional study in primary school from grade 2 to grade 5.

Background: In several countries, children's math skills have been declining at an alarming rate in recent years and decades, and one of the explanations for this alarming situation is that children have difficulties in establishing the relations between arithmetical operations.

Aim: In order to address this question, our goal was to determine the predictive power of previously taught operations on newly taught ones above general cognitive skills and basic numerical skills.

Samples: More than one hundred children in each school level from Grades 2 to 5 from various socio-cultural environments (N = 435, 229 girls) were tested.

Facilitating Text Production in Fourth Graders: Effects of Script-Based Knowledge and Writing Prompts.

This study aimed at providing evidence that prior knowledge (semantic relatedness) and its organization (scripted versus not related) prompted either through pictures alone, pictures and associated words, words only have different impacts on several components of text produced by fourth graders. The results showed that the semantic relatedness affected three dependent measures: prompt words recalled, coherence and quality of texts. The nature of the prompts impacted on planning (number of ideas) and translating (number of propositions and length of texts) processes.

Rapid automatized naming skills of children with intellectual disability.

Background: A deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), acknowledged to be linked to dyslexia, has rarely been investigated as a potential explanation of the reading difficulties that children with intellectual disability (ID) often face. The existing studies mainly focused on adolescent or adults with ID matched to typically developing (TD) children on verbal mental age, or used a single RAN task.

Aims: The aim of this study was to compare the RAN pattern and skills of children with ID and low reading skills to the ones of TD children with matched reading skills.

When one-two-three beats two-one-three: Tracking the acquisition of the verbal number sequence.

Learning how to count is a crucial step in cognitive development, which progressively allows for more elaborate numerical processing. The existing body of research consistently reports how children associate the verbal code with exact quantity. However, the early acquisition of this code, when the verbal numbers are encoded in long-term memory as a sequence of words, has rarely been examined.

The use of automated procedures by older adults with high arithmetic skills during addition problem solving.

In contrast to other cognitive abilities, arithmetic skills are known to be preserved in healthy elderly adults. In fact, they would even outperform young adults because they more often retrieve arithmetic facts from long-term memory. Nevertheless, we suggest here that the superiority of older over younger adults could also stem from the use of more efficient automated and unconscious counting procedures.

General and Specific Contributions of RAN to Reading and Arithmetic Fluency in First Graders: A Longitudinal Latent Variable Approach.

In the present study, we opted for a longitudinal design and examined rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance from two perspectives. In a first step, we examined the structure of RAN performance from a general cognitive perspective. We investigated whether rapid naming measures (e.

Hippocampal spatial mechanisms relate to the development of arithmetic symbol processing in children.

Understanding the meaning of abstract mathematical symbols is a cornerstone of arithmetic learning in children. Studies have long focused on the role of spatial intuitions in the processing of numerals. However, it has been argued that such intuitions may also underlie symbols that convey fundamental arithmetic concepts, such as arithmetic operators.

What's Behind a "+" Sign? Perceiving an Arithmetic Operator Recruits Brain Circuits for Spatial Orienting.

Do mathematical symbols evoke spatial representations? Although behavioral studies have long demonstrated interactions between space and the processing of Arabic digits, how to interpret these results remains controversial. Here, we tested whether activity in regions supporting spatial processing contributes to the processing of symbols conveying fundamental arithmetic concepts-such as operation signs-even in the absence of associated digits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that merely perceiving a "+" sign triggers activity in brain regions that support the orienting of spatial attention in adults.

Relationships of French and English Morphophonemic Orthographies to Word Reading, Spelling, and Reading Comprehension during Early and Middle Childhood.

Two longitudinal studies of word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension identified commonalities and differences in morphophonemic orthographies-French (Study 1, =1313) or English (Study 2, =114) in early childhood (grade 2) and middle childhood (grade 5). For French and English, statistically significant concurrent relationships among these literacy skills occurred in grades 2 and 5, and longitudinal relationships for each skill with itself from grade 2 to 5; but concurrent relationships were more sizable and longitudinal relationships more variable for English than French especially for word reading to reading comprehension. Results show that, for both morphophonemic orthographies, assessment and instructional practices should be tailored to early or middle childhood, and early childhood reading comprehension may not be related to middle childhood spelling.

Identifying strategies in arithmetic with the operand recognition paradigm: a matter of switch cost?

Determining adults' and children's strategies in mental arithmetic constitutes a central issue in the domain of numerical cognition. However, despite the considerable amount of research on this topic, the conclusions in the literature are not always coherent. Therefore, there is a need to carry on the investigation, and this is the reason why we developed the operand recognition paradigm (ORP).

Interword and intraword pause threshold in writing.

Writing words in real life involves setting objectives, imagining a recipient, translating ideas into linguistic forms, managing grapho-motor gestures, etc. Understanding writing requires observation of the processes as they occur in real time. Analysis of pauses is one of the preferred methods for accessing the dynamics of writing and is based on the idea that pauses are behavioral correlates of cognitive processes.

Learning to spell from reading: general knowledge about spelling patterns influences memory for specific words.

Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets.

How does graphotactic knowledge influence children's learning of new spellings?

TWO EXPERIMENTS INVESTIGATED WHETHER AND HOW THE LEARNING OF SPELLINGS BY FRENCH THIRD GRADERS IS INFLUENCED BY TWO GRAPHOTACTIC PATTERNS: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and consonants cannot double after single consonants (Experiment 2). Children silently read meaningful texts that contained three types of novel spellings: no doublet (e.g.

The role of fingers in number processing in young children.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between finger counting and numerical processing in 4-7-year-old children. Children were assessed on a variety of numerical tasks and we examined the correlations between their rates of success and their frequency of finger use in a counting task. We showed that children's performance on finger pattern comparison and identification tasks did not correlate with the frequency of finger use.

Substituted-letter and transposed-letter effects in a masked priming paradigm with French developing readers and dyslexics.

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 transposed-letter primes were used in a masked priming paradigm with third graders, fifth graders, adults, and phonological dyslexics matched on reading level with the third graders. No priming effect was found in third graders.

The use of the operand-recognition paradigm for the study of mental addition in older adults.

Objectives: Determining how individuals solve arithmetic problems is crucial for our understanding of human cognitive architecture. Elderly adults are supposed to use memory retrieval more often than younger ones. However, they might backup their retrieval by reconstructive strategies.

The use of procedural knowledge in simple addition and subtraction problems.

In a first experiment, adults were asked to solve one-digit additions, subtractions and multiplications. When the sign appeared 150 ms before the operands, addition and subtraction were solved faster than when the sign and the operands appeared simultaneously on screen. This priming effect was not observed for multiplication problems.

For a psycholinguistic model of handwriting production: testing the syllable-bigram controversy.

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram.

Mental subtraction in high- and lower skilled arithmetic problem solvers: verbal report versus operand-recognition paradigms.

The authors used the operand-recognition paradigm (C. Thevenot, M. Fanget, & M.

Evidence for knowledge of the syntax of large numbers in preschoolers.

The aim of this study was to provide evidence for knowledge of the syntax governing the verbal form of large numbers in preschoolers long before they are able to count up to these numbers. We reasoned that if such knowledge exists, it should facilitate the maintenance in short-term memory of lists of lexical primitives that constitute a number (e.g.

Quality control in the optical industry: From a work analysis of lens inspection to a training programme, an experimental case study.

A cognitive work analysis of quality inspection in the optical industry has been carried out in order to devise a training programme. The task concerned the inspection of high quality human eyeglass lenses. We conducted an experimental investigation of defect detection and acceptability decision-making tasks in 18 experts and novice inspectors.

Orthographic vs. phonologic syllables in handwriting production.

French children program the words they write syllable by syllable. We examined whether the syllable the children use to segment words is determined phonologically (i.e.

Time, number and length: similarities and differences in discrimination in adults and children.

The aim of this study was to focus on similarities in the discrimination of three different quantities--time, number, and line length--using a bisection task involving children aged 5 and 8 years and adults, when number and length were presented nonsequentially (Experiment 1) and sequentially (Experiment 2). In the nonsequential condition, for all age groups, although to a greater extent in the younger children, the psychophysical functions were flatter, and the Weber ratio higher for time than for number and length. Number and length yielded similar psychophysical functions.

Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account.

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions.

Usage-based account of the acquisition of liaison: evidence from sensitivity to the singular/plural orientation of nouns.

This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g.