Temporal resolution of auditory perception and verbal working memory in 15 children with language impairment

We investigated temporal resolution of auditory perception (TRAP), verbal working memory, and speech perception in 15 children with language impairment (LI) in comparison with a control group of 99 typical children. A computerized two-choice test was used to assess these three abilities. No deficits in TRAP were found in the LI group, and the thresholds were similar for both study groups. It was interesting that the variability was high for both groups and that the control group's performance was poorer than reported in some previously published studies. There were significant differences in the two groups' performance on speech perception and verbal working memory. Working memory was the most sensitive of these two measures.     

Age and language skills of deaf children in relation to theory of mind development

Using four traditional false-belief tasks, I investigated deaf children's age and expressive language skills in relation to their theory of mind development. The children's parents who signed reported on their own knowledge of a mental sign vocabulary. The results indicate age of the child to be strongly related to theory of mind development. Deaf children demonstrated an ability to pass the theory of mind assessment battery between the ages of 7 and 8 years, on average. In comparison, hearing children have consistently demonstrated the ability to perform such tasks between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Therefore, the results indicate deaf children are delayed by approximately 3 years in this cognitive developmental milestone. Expressive language skills of the children and sign language skills of the parents who signed were not found to be significantly related to the children's theory of mind development.     

Working memory resources in children: stability and relation to subsequent academic skills

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which WM measured in kindergarten predicts WM measured in second grade (stability of individual WM progress) and the extent to which WM measured at kindergarten predicts academic performance at second grade (N?=?94). The results showed that WM skills significantly increase during the time span from Finnish kindergarten to second grade. Verbal (VWM) and visuospatial WM (VSWM) resources seem to develop quite independently, whereas individual progress showed some stability. WM resources measured just before the start of formal school predicted later academic performance and VWM acted as more powerful predictor than VSWM resources. The results have two important educational implications: first, an individual or group-based intervention designed to enhance children’s WM skills would be most important even before the start of school, and second, poor WM skills should be addressed when planning the learning environment beginning in kindergarten.     

Reading comprehension,working memory and higher-level language skills in children with SLI and/or dyslexia

This study examined (1) whether working memory and higher-level languages skills—inferencing and comprehension monitoring—accounted for individual differences among Chinese children in Chinese reading comprehension, after controlling for age, Chinese word reading and oral language skills, and (2) whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) or dyslexia showed deficits in these skills. Eighty-two Cantonese Chinese-speaking children between the age of 7; 8–9; 5 were assessed. Regression analyses on the full sample offered support for the first question. The children were also classified into four groups: Typically-developing (TD; N = 34), specific language impairment-only (SLI-only; N = 18), SLI-dyslexia comorbid (SLI-D; N = 22) and dyslexia-only (D-only; N = 8). Pair-wise comparisons focusing on the second question revealed that both the SLI-only and the D-only group performed worse than the TD group in reading comprehension after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. The SLI-only and the D-only group showed a different profile of deficits: only the SLI-only group performed worse than the TD group in working memory, comprehension monitoring, and inferencing. The SLI-D comorbid group did worse than the SLI-only, but not the D-only group, in reading comprehension. The SLI-D comorbid group did not do worse than either single diagnosis group in the higher-level language skills associated with reading comprehension. These findings suggested adopting different intervention approaches for reading comprehension difficulties in children with SLI versus children with dyslexia.     

Visual and phonological coding in working memory and orthographic skills of deaf children using Chilean sign language

Deaf children can improve their reading skills by learning to use alternative, visual codes such as fingerspelling. A sample of 28 deaf children between the ages of 7 and 16 years was used as an experimental group and another sample of 15 hearing children of similar age and academic level as a control group. Two experiments were carried out to study the possible interactions between phonological and visual codes and working memory, and to understand the relationships between these codes and reading and orthographic achievement. The results highlight the relationship between dactylic and orthographic coding. Just as phoneme-to-grapheme knowledge can facilitate reading for hearing children, fingerspelling-to-grapheme knowledge has the potential to play a similar role for deaf readers.     

The relation between phonological memory skills and reading ability in greek-speaking children: Can training of phonological memory contribute to reading development?

This study was designed to examine whether there is a relationship between phonological memory and reading ability in Greek-speaking children aged between 6 and 9 years. An additional aim of the study was to investigate whether training of phonological memory during preschool years enhances reading achievement during early school years. In Experiment I, the phonological memory ability of 136 first graders, 134 second graders and 132 from each of the third and fourth grades was assessed with a nonword repetition test. A reading test was also used to evaluate the reading skills of the above subjects. The results revealed strong links between reading performance and nonword repetition scores. 120 kindergarten children randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group participated in Experiment 2. Training that involved practice in the repetition of nonwords was used as a means of promoting the phonological memory of the children in the experimental group over the course of one year in school. Subjects’ reading ability was tested during the last month of their first year in the primary school. The findings showed that the performance of the trained subjects in the reading test was superior to that of the control subjects. Such evidence underlines the importance of teaching children of preschool years phonological strategies in order to boost their reading skills during early school years.     

Prenatal testosterone,visual-spatial memory,and numerical skills in young children

Lateralization of the brain is strongly influenced by prenatal androgens, with differential exposure thought to account for cognitive sex differences. This study investigated sex and individual differences and relationships between 2D:4D (the ratio of the 2nd to 4th digit [digit ratio] as a proxy indicator of prenatal testosterone exposure), visual-spatial memory, and numerical skills in 5-year-old children. No sex differences were found in any of the numerical or visual-spatial tasks. Visual-spatial memory was positively correlated with arithmetic score. Girls with a lower (more masculinised) 2D:4D had better number sense and visual-spatial skills, whilst boys with lower 2D:4D had better arithmetic skills. This suggests that prenatal testosterone exposure may have differential effects on the visual-spatial and numerical skills of girls and boys.     

General auditory processing,speech perception and phonological awareness skills in Chinese–English biliteracy

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese‐speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2–4 (N=133) participated and were administered measures of IQ, word reading, phonological awareness, speech perception and auditory processing in both L1 and L2. Auditory processing uniquely explained both L1 and L2 word reading. While L1 speech perception accounted for unique variance in L1 word reading, L2 phonological awareness explained unique variance in L2 word reading. In cross‐language comparisons, L1 phonological awareness and speech perception were uniquely associated with L2 word reading, suggesting cross‐language transfer from L1 to L2 only. Results underscore the importance of auditory processing for reading across variable learning contexts.     

Suggestibility in neglected children: The influence of intelligence,language, and social skills

We administered the GSS-2, a standardised measure of suggestibility, to 5- to 12-year-old children to ascertain whether neglected children’s responses to leading questions distinguish them from those of their non-neglected counterparts. Neglected children (n = 75) were more likely than an age-matched sample of non-neglected children (n = 75) to yield to leading questions, despite no difference in their ability to recall the test stimuli. Subsequent collection of individual difference data from the neglected sample revealed that this effect could not be attributed to intelligence, language ability, problem behaviours, age at onset of neglect, or time spent in out-of-home care. With respect to social skill, however, suggestibility was positively correlated with communicative skill, and marginally positively correlated with assertion and engagement. While on the surface our social skills findings seem counter-intuitive, it is possible that maltreated children with relative strengths in these areas have learned to comply with adults in their environment as a way to protect themselves or even foster belonging. Our data, while preliminary, raise interesting questions about whether targeted interventions could help these children to more actively participate in decisions about their lives.     

The role of the working memory and language skills in the prediction of word problem solving in 4- to 7-year-old children

The aim of this study was to analyse the role of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory (WM) and language skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension) in predicting preschool and kindergarten-aged children’s ability to solve mathematical word problems presented orally. The participants were 116 Finnish-speaking children aged 4–7?years. The results showed that verbal WM (VWM) did not have a direct effect on word problems in young children but was indirectly related to word problems through vocabulary and listening comprehension. These results suggest that in young children, VWM resources support language skills which, furthermore, contribute to variation in solving orally presented word problems. The results also showed that visuo-spatial WM had a direct effect on performance in word problems, suggesting that it plays an important role in word problem solving among this age group.     

Reading,syntactic, and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children

The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and to determine the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems in Portuguese. The study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 37 bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children, aged 9–12 years. English was their main instructional language and Portuguese was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program at school where they were taught to read and write Portuguese. The children were administered word and pseudoword reading, language, and working memory tasks in English and Portuguese. The majority of the children (67%) showed at least average proficiency in both languages. The children who had low reading scores in English also had significantly lower scores on the Portuguese tasks. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudoword reading, working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The Portuguese-Canadian children who were normally achieving readers did not differ from a comparison group of monolingual English speaking normally achieving readers except that the bilingual children had significantly lower scores on the English syntactic awareness task. The bilingual reading disabled children had similar scores to the monolingual reading disabled children on word reading and working memory but lower scores on the syntactic awareness task. However, the bilingual reading disabled children had significantlyhigher scores than the monolingual English speaking reading disabled children on the English pseudoword reading test and the English spelling task, perhaps reflecting a positive transfer from the more regular grapheme phoneme conversion rules of Portuguese. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of reading skills. In both English and Portuguese, reading difficulties appear to be strongly related to deficits in phonological processing.     

Deafness, language skills, and rehearsal: a model for the development of a memory strategy

We review a series of studies that evaluate the role of developing language skills as a prerequisite to spontaneous rehearsal use in deaf populations. We propose a theoretical model that summarizes the contribution of language skills by highlighting the interrelations among age, language proficiency, and automatized language skills. In an initial test of the model, an index of deaf children's language experience was found to be an almost complete mediator of strategy use. Increasing language proficiency, therefore, was implicated as a critical variable in predicting children's spontaneous rehearsal use, minimizing any direct contribution from age per se. In a more direct assessment of the link between general language proficiency and rehearsal use, pragmatic language skills (as measured by the Language Proficiency Profile: LPP-I) were found to be a nearly complete mediator of rehearsal use, with the remaining contributions of age and language experience being nonsignificant. Language proficiency, therefore, was identified as a strong and necessary prerequisite for rehearsal to be used spontaneously as a memory strategy. The additional hypothesis that the automatization of these general language skills, measured by a rapid automatized naming task (RAN), contributes to spontaneous rehearsal was also evaluated. Automatized language emerged as a partial mediator of the language proficiency → rehearsal use relation but additional language-processing variables were implicated. We discuss these findings as they relate to issues around the nature of language proficiency and the identification of those automatized language skills involved in rehearsal.     

Early literacy and comprehension skills in children learning English as an additional language and monolingual children with language weaknesses

Many children learning English as an additional language (EAL) show reading comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding. However, the relationship between early language and reading comprehension in this group is not fully understood. The language and literacy skills of 80 children learning English from diverse language backgrounds and 80 monolingual English-speaking peers with language weaknesses were assessed at school entry (mean age = 4 years, 7 months) and after 2 years of schooling in the UK (mean age = 6 years, 3 months). The EAL group showed weaker language skills and stronger word reading than the monolingual group but no difference in reading comprehension. Individual differences in reading comprehension were predicted by variations in decoding and language comprehension in both groups to a similar degree.     

The number skills of children with specific language difficulties

This research, undertaken by Dr Gina Conti-Ramsden and her team at the University of Manchester, involved investigating three groups of children: children with specific language difficulties; 'maths poor' children; and a control group (n = 15, 12 and 15 respectively). These three groups of children were compared on a task of processing two and three digit numbers. Few differences were found between the children who had language difficulties and those who were 'maths poor'. These findings suggest that both groups of children may have some form of language difficulty that contributes to a delayed performance on some maths related tasks.     

Phonological working memory, phonological awareness and language in literacy difficulties in Brazilian children

One of the most usual flaws that lead to literacy disability regards cognitive difficulties and alterations some children present in the literacy process. Many studies have found alterations in phonological processing, more specifically in phonological working memory (PWM) and phonological awareness (PA). Therefore, our aim was to identify alterations in skills of phonological working memory, phonological awareness and language (semantic, syntactic and phonological aspects) of Brazilian children with literacy disabilities (age 7–8). They were divided into two groups: (1) Group of Normal Literacy (NL); and (2) Group With Literacy Disabilities (LD). The evaluation comprised tests that assessed general cognitive functions and the skills at stake. The LD presented a poorer performance than the NL in the skills of PWM, PA and language aspects. The factor analysis showed that these skills prevailed in differentiating the groups. Thus, children with literacy disabilities presented deficits in phonological processing and language. These deficits seem to be a result of alterations of the phonological representations and poor language skills that are prior to the literacy period. Consequently, we believe that the early identification of these alterations can be very useful for the prevention of future literacy problems.     

Computational skills, working memory, and conceptual knowledge in older children with mathematics learning disabilities

Knowledge and skill in multiplication were investigated for late elementary-grade students with mathematics learning disabilities (MLD), typically achieving age-matched peers, low-achieving age-matched peers, and ability-matched peers by examining multiple measures of computational skill, working memory, and conceptual knowledge. Poor multiplication fact mastery and calculation fluency and general working memory discriminated children with MLD from typically achieving age-matched peers. Furthermore, children with MLD were slower in executing backup procedures than typically achieving age-matched peers. The performance of children with MLD on multiple measures of multiplication skill and knowledge was most similar to that of ability-matched younger children. MLD may be due to difficulties in computational skills and working memory. Implications for the diagnosis and remediation of MLD are discussed.