Visual and auditory priming influences the production of low-frequency spellings

Three experiments investigated whether production of low-frequency spellings could be influenced by other words containing those spellings. Participants saw visually-presented primes (Experiment 1) or heard primes presented auditorily and produced their spelling (Experiments 2 and 3). Primes either shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., chapl ai n) or only orthography (e.g., ord ai n) with the target word (e.g., porcel ai n). Following the primes, participants attempted to produce the correct spellings of auditorily-presented target words containing low-frequency spellings, such as the ai in porcelain. Participants correctly spelled the targets’ low-frequency spelling more often when preceded by either type of prime, relative to unprimed targets. Furthermore, priming only occurred when the prime’s spelling was produced correctly; primes spelled incorrectly reduced the correct production of target spellings. These results suggest that unlike the priming of nonwords, the basis of lexical priming of real words is orthographic, resulting from the priming of specific graphemes that increases the probability of reactivating the same spelling pattern in the target.

Do Italian dyslexic children use the lexical reading route efficiently? An orthographic judgment task

The study uses an orthographic judgment task to evaluate the efficiency of the lexical reading route in Italian dyslexic children. It has been suggested that Italian dyslexic children rely prevalently on the sub-word-level routine for reading. However, it is not easy to test the lexical reading route in Italian directly because of the lack of critical items (irregular words), so visual lexical decision tasks and the comprehension/detection of pseudo-homophones are often used. While the former may also be solved on the basis of visual familiarity or phonological re-codification, the latter also involves conceptual and syntactic skills. Eleven dyslexic children participated in the study, performing an orthographic judgment task on stimuli with two phonologically plausible spellings, of which only one was orthographically correct. Their performance was compared with those of 11 proficient readers. The dyslexic children showed selective impairment in detecting phonologically plausible errors, but their performance was normal when required to judge errors inserted in words with regular orthography, i.e., devoid of orthographic ambiguity, and for which a sub-word-level reading procedure is sufficient to guarantee a good performance. Overall, data are coherent with a diagnosis of surface dyslexia, with most children showing defective orthographic lexical processing.

Reading and spelling acquisition in European Portuguese: a preliminary study

We investigated the initial development of reading and spelling in European Portuguese. First-graders, tested in February and June, had to read and spell words and pseudowords. In February there were regularity and graphemic complexity effects, indicating that these children relied on grapheme–phoneme conversion. The lexicality effect found in spelling, in June, suggest that by the end of first grade these children had begun to construct an orthographic lexicon. However, lexical addressing is not inconsistent with phonological mediation as regularization errors increased between the sessions. Additionally, the previously reported similarity in global performance of Portuguese and French beginning readers may conceal processing differences that are related to specific characteristics of the corresponding orthographic codes.

Student counselling at Utrecht University

The enormous increase in the number of students at Dutch universities in the sixties and seventies made it impossible for professors to deal with the many different questions students confronted them with. New professionals, student counsellors/psychologists and student advisers entered the universities. Three levels of counselling can be distinguished:

Subtypes of developmental dyslexia: The influence of definitional variables

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that the manner in which a reading disability is defined will influence the conclusions that are made about the characteristics of the disability. To test this hypothesis, learning disabled and normally achieving children, aged 6 to 14, were administered tasks measuring grammatical, shortterm memory, phonological, reading, and visual-spatial skills. The poor readers were divided into groups of poor readers with

Reconsidering the Character and Role of Inquiry in School Science: Analysis of a Conference

We summarize a conference on scientific inquiry bringing together science educators, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science with three goals:

Guidelines for moderating online educational computer conferences

Moderating computer conferences is both is challenging and stimulating. Knowledge of the dynamics of preparing an asynchronous conference and how the functions of moderators differ at different stages of a conference will help to make the process run smoothly and enjoyably. A few concepts to keep in mind are:

The role of compound awareness in Chinese children’s vocabulary acquisition and character reading

This study examined compound awareness in relation to Chinese children's vocabulary acquisition and character reading. Two aspects of compound awareness were investigated: the ability to identify the head of a compound noun and the ability to construct a new compound word from familiar morphemes. The compound awareness tasks, along with rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness tasks, were administered to 29 first graders and 30 second graders in Mainland China. Results show that (1) compound awareness develops relatively early among Chinese children and improves with age, (2) compound awareness explains unique variance in vocabulary and character reading, after controlling for age, RAN, and phonological awareness, and (3) the contribution made by compound awareness to vocabulary is much larger than the contribution made by phonological awareness. These results demonstrate that compound awareness plays a central role in Chinese children's literacy development, particularly in vocabulary acquisition.

Sensitivity to rhythmic parameters in dyslexic children: a comparison of Hungarian and English

It has been proposed that sensitivity to the parameters underlying speech rhythm may be important in setting up well-specified phonological representations in the mental lexicon. However, different acoustic parameters may contribute differentially to rhythm and stress in different languages. Here we contrast sensitivity to one such cue, amplitude envelope onset (rise time), in dyslexic and normally-developing children in two languages, Hungarian and English, ages from 7 to 11. Dyslexic and control children received phonological tasks, reading and spelling tasks and auditory processing tasks. While sensitivity to rise time was related to phonological representation in both languages, clear differences were found between languages. It is suggested that these differences may reflect differential language-specific weighting of different acoustic cues to rhythm and stress.

Continuities between speech and spelling in a case of developmental dyslexia

This paper explores the relationship between speech and spelling in a single-case study of developmental dyslexia. JM, a developmental dyslexic with a well-documented history of speech, reading and spelling difficulties, was examined when he was 13–14 years old. He still had subtle articulation difficulties causing some disfluency and his use of phonetic voicing was atypical. We argue that these difficulties were recapitulated in his spelling where he was more sensitive to the prosodic aspects of words than normal spellers, exhibiting a strong tendency to spell accurately words which are stressed on the first, rather than the second syllable. He also had more difficulty with phonetic voicing and spelling errors reflected this uncertainty. Thus, when word-specific (orthographic) spelling information is unavailable, JM, like all spellers, must make use of phonological spelling strategies. In his case, these are compromised because of underlying phonological speech problems. It is argued that, while young children make use of a phonological frame on which to organize orthographic information, dyslexics, like JM, who have inadequate phonological representations, are unable to do so. This has a detrimental effect on their acquisition of spelling.     

Purposive environments: Engaging students in the values and practices of history

Recent research on student learning has given close attention to how students experiences and actions are mediated by the whole university learning–teaching environment in which they find themselves. The current article pursues this focus on learning–teaching environments in two stages. Guided by socio-cultural perspectives on learning, the first part:

Planification a long terme du systeme pedagogique Hongrois

Cette étude s'occupe du problème de la planification à long terme de l'éducation. Tout d'abord, elle considère la conception fondamentale du système d'éducation, indiquant quels sont les facteurs essentiels dans l'éducation nationale en Hongrie. Les auteurs cherchent alors, au moyen d'une conception de la théorie de systèmes, de donner à cette éducation une place dans la société et dans la civilisation — en tenant compte du fait que l'éducation nationale est un système d'une indépendance relative. De là, ils examinent les motifs imposés par la planification du développement à long terme.Un chapitre important examine la planification comme un processus et la considère comme un élément essentiel concomitant de la stratégie du développement dans les phases suivantes:

Teaching and learning in higher education: Recent trends

In the last decade, the questioning of traditional teaching and learning methods and instructional systems and the search for more effective alternatives have gained momentum in higher education. Recent trends can be grouped as follows:

Reading and writing: what is the relationship with anxiety and depression?

Learning can be considered a function of synthesis in which both cognitive functioning and the domain of affectivity convey. The aim of the present study was to investigate how specific literacy skills, i.e., reading and writing, relate to two main dimensions of negative affectivity, i.e., anxiety and depression. Study 1 was conducted on third grade children (72), while Study 2 focused on first grade children (43). Two groups of participants selected because they had been deemed ‘at risk’ for the development of anxiety or depression and a control group were compared in reading and writing tasks, which included both word and non-word lists. The assessment included also the evaluation of Verbal, Nonverbal and Composite IQs. Results indicated that children ‘at risk’ for depression made more spelling errors in dictation of words in comparison to the control group. No differences emerged in reading tasks or with reference to the group of children ‘at risk’ for anxiety.

French immersion in Canada: Theory and practice

French immersion programs are rapidly becoming an integral part of the Canadian education system. Its educational and linguistic achievements have been the subject of an abundant literature that continues to grow. The popularity of the program has helped it expand at a phenomenal rate. From one school and a handful of students in the experimental classes 25 years ago, there are now more than 17,000 schools offering French immersion instruction to close to 250,000 students in all major Canadian cities.The major theoretical foundations on which French immersion was explicitly and sometimes implicitly based may be summarized as follows:

The relationship between home literacy practices and developmental trajectories of emergent literacy and conventional literacy skills for Korean children

Previous studies with English-speaking families in the North American context demonstrated that home literacy practices have positive influences on children’s literacy acquisition. The present study expands previous studies by examining how home literacy practices are related to growth trajectories of emergent literacy skills (i.e., vocabulary, letter-name knowledge, and phonological awareness) and conventional literacy skills (i.e., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling), and by using data from Korean children and families (N = 192). The study revealed two dimensions of home literacy practices, home reading and parent teaching. Frequent reading at home was positively associated with children’s emergent literacy skills as well as conventional literacy skills in Korean. However, children whose parents reported more frequent teaching tended to have low scores in their phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading and pseudoword reading after accounting for home reading. These results suggest a bidirectional relationship between home literacy practices, parent teaching in particular, and children’s literacy skills such that parents adjust their teaching in response to their child’s literacy acquisition. Furthermore, cultural variation in views on parent teaching may explain these results.

Every word problem has a solution-The social rationality of mathematical modeling in schools

The focus of this paper is on sense-making and the use of real-world knowledge in mathematical modeling in schools. Arguments are put forward that classroom word problem solving is more—and also less—than the analysis of subject-matter structures. Students easily “solve” stereotyped, even unsolvable, problems without any regard to the constraints of factual reality. Mathematics learning in schools is inseparable not only from the materials employed, but from the macro- and microcultural web of practices within the social context of schooling. It represents, beyond the insightful activity of ideal problem solving, a type of socio-cognitive skill.The two experiments reported replicate and extend a study by Verschaffel, De Corte, and Lasure (1994). In the first experiment, a list of standard problems that could be solved by straightforward use of arithmetic operations, and a parallel list of problems which were problematic with respect to realistic mathematical modeling, were administered to fourth and fifth graders. In the second experiment, a similar list of problematic problems was presented to seventh graders under three socio-contextual conditions varying in the degree to which the pupils were told or signaled that the problems were more difficult to solve than it seemed at first or that they even could be unsolvable. The result of both studies was that most pupils “solved” a significant part of the unsolvable problems without evincing “realistic reactions”. This overall finding is discussed with respect to three issues:

• 1. 

  (i) the quality of word problems employed in mathematics education,

• 2. 

  (ii) the culture of teaching and learning, and

• 3. 

  (iii) the more general issue of social rationality in school mathematics problem solving.

     

Children's sensitivity to rime unit frequency when spelling words and nonwords

This paper presents two experiments investigating 8–9 year old children's sensitivity to rime level sound-spelling correspondence units when spelling words and nonwords. In Experiment 1, children spelled more words correctly if they contained a common rime unit rather than a unique or irregular unit. In Experiment 2, children spelled more words and nonwords correctly if they had many rime unit neighbours; words and nonwords with average or few rime unit neighbours were spelled less well. These findings show that children's spelling can not be described simply according to one-to-one phoneme-grapheme mapping. Instead, children are sensitive to lexical factors such as rime unit sound-spelling correspondence. The findings are interpreted within the framework of a connectionist model of spelling development.