Children's heart rate reactivity responses to three school tasks

The effects of three routine classroom tasks upon heart rate reactivity were investigated with a sample of 30 typical fifth-grade children. Instructions for a mental arithmetic task, the mental arithmetic task itself, and silent reading were administered under standardized conditions, with a reward being offered for performance on the mental arithmetic task to enhance competition. Heart rate was individually monitored each second during these tasks, and data were collected on mental arithmetic performance and reading ability. Results indicated that some children showed large increases in their heart rates during the three tasks, and that these children should be considered as at-risk in terms of their cardiac health.     

Using semantics, grammar, phonology, and rapid naming tasks to predict word identification

This study investigated the relative importance of semantic, grammatical, phonological, and rapid naming abilities in predicting word identification in a large, representative sample of children enrolled in first through sixth grade, using correlation, factor analysis, multiple regression, and predictive outcome analysis techniques. Composite measures of these abilities were found to correlate significantly with word identification, even after controlling for the effects of nonverbal intelligence. Factor analysis indicated that the spoken language composites and the word identification composite loaded on one factor, whereas the perceptual speed composites loaded on a second factor. Multiple regression analyses showed that among younger children in the early stages of learning to read and children whose word identifying skills were below average, the phonology and rapid naming composites accounted for the most variance in predicting word identification skills. Among older children and children who were proficient in word identification, the semantics composite accounted for the most variance. The most important analyses in this study (i.e., the calculations of the sensitivity indexes, the specificity indexes, and the positive predictive values) evaluated the practical value of using the composites to predict poor word identification skills in children. To be considered practically useful, all predictive outcome values had to be .75 or greater. None of the composites studied, including an application of the double-deficit hypothesis, met this criterion. The results from this study question the accuracy and utility of using any of the abilities studied to predict which students are at risk for or have poor word identification skills.     

Children's strategies and goals in response to help-giving and help-seeking tasks within a friendship

The present research tested whether children's responses to help-giving and help-seeking friendship tasks predicted how many friends they had and the quality of their best friendship. Fifth-grade children (N=511; typically 10 or 11 years old) responded to vignettes in which they could either give help to a friend or seek help from a friend. Children's strategies and goals in both contexts were significantly correlated with the number of friends children had. Responses in the help-giving context but not in the help-seeking context were significantly associated with friendship quality. Although gender differences in strategies and goals were found, strategies and goals were related to the number of friends and friendship quality for both boys and girls.     

Eye movements of university students with and without reading difficulties during naming speed tasks

Although naming speed (NS) has been shown to predict reading into adulthood and differentiate between adult dyslexics and controls, the question remains why NS is related to reading. To address this question, eye movement methodology was combined with three letter NS tasks (the original letter NS task by Denckla & Rudel, Cortex 10:186–202, 1974, and two more developed by Compton, The Journal of Special Education 37:81–94, 2003, with increased phonological or visual similarity of the letters). Twenty undergraduate students with reading difficulties (RD) and 27 without (NRD) were tested on letter NS tasks (eye movements were recorded during the NS tasks), phonological processing, and reading fluency. The results indicated first that the RD group was slower than the NRD group on all NS tasks with no differences between the NS tasks. In addition, the NRD group had shorter fixation durations, longer saccades, and fewer saccades and fixations than the RD group. Fixation duration and fixation count were significant predictors of reading fluency even after controlling for phonological processing measures. Taken together, these findings suggest that the NS–reading relationship is due to two factors: less able readers require more time to acquire stimulus information during fixation and they make more saccades.     

Children's knowledge of the earth's shape and its gravitational field

Abstract

One hundred and eight children aged between seven and 11 took part in a cross‐sectional study of the development of their concepts of the Earth and the direction of its gravitational field. A new form of ‘Earth drawing classification’ (EDC) was found to be drawn by 36% of the sample, together with the five classifications established in earlier work. This new EDC is conceptually contradictory and appears to be a critical development stage. It is the result of the pupils’ attempts to reconcile scientific information with their own common‐sense knowledge base. The educational implications of this are discussed. The relationship between the developmental sequence of their Earth drawings and the quality of their human figure drawing was also investigated. It was established that restricted drawing ability does not explain their non‐scientific early EDCs.     

Executive processes in appearance-reality tasks: the role of inhibition of attention and symbolic representation

Two studies addressed the role of representation ability and control of attention on solutions to an appearance-reality task based on two types of objects, real and representational. In Study 1, 67 preschool children (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) solved appearance-reality problems and executive processing tasks. There was an interaction between object type (real vs. representational) and question type (appearance vs. reality) on problem difficulty. In addition, representational ability predicted performance on appearance questions and inhibitory control predicted performance on reality questions. In Study 2, 95 children (4- and 5-year-olds) who were monolingual or bilingual solved similar problems. On appearance questions, groups performed equivalently but on reality questions, bilinguals performed better (once language proficiency had been controlled). The difference is attributed to the advanced inhibitory control that comes with bilingualism.     

The effect of orthographic depth on letter string processing: the case of visual attention span and rapid automatized naming

The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN.     

Parents' Reactions to Children's Negative Emotions: Relations to Children's Social Competence and Comforting Behavior

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of mothers' and fathers' reported emotion-related practices to parents' and teachers' reports of third-to sixth-grade children's social skills, popularity, and coping, as well as the quantity and quality of children's comforting of an infant. Mothers' problem-focused reactions tended to be positively associated with children's social functioning and coping, whereas maternal minimizing reactions tended to be linked to lower levels of social competence and high levels of avoidant coping. There were few findings for fathers' reactions, although fathers reported fewer problem-focused reactions with socially competent, in contrast to less competent, daughters. Emotion-focused and problem-focused maternal reactions, as well as encouragement of the expression of emotion, were associated with boys' children's comforting behavior, although a moderate level of maternal encouragement of the expression of emotion was associated with quality of girls' comforting.     

Selective attention deficits in poor readers? Dichotic listening, speeded classification, and auditory and visual central and incidental learning tasks

Poor readers (PRs) and controls (i.e., normal readers) from the second, fourth, and sixth grades were compared on four tasks chosen to measure the development of selective attention. The PRs performed more poorly than controls on the central but not on the incidental portion of an auditory memory task. The differences on the central task were interpreted as a function of group differences in mnemonic skills rather than selective attention. There were no group differences on either central or incidental portions of a visual memory task. In a speeded classification task, PRs exhibited a slower rate of information processing, measured in bits of information transmitted per second, than controls, but this difference in rate was not affected by distraction. On a dichotic listening task, PRs performed more poorly than controls under a variety of conditions in which the presence of distraction, the rate of information presentation, and attended ear were manipulated; the pattern of differences obtained, however, was not readily interpretable as a function of greater distractibility on the part of PRs than controls. As a whole, the results did not support the hypothesis that PRs show deficits in selective attention relative to age-matched normal readers. In addition, correlations computed among indices of selectivity (residualized gain scores) derived from the four tasks were uniformly low, suggesting that the four tasks did not measure the same cognitive construct. The implications for the study of reading disabilities and for the construct of selective attention in developmental studies are discussed.     

Rapid naming contributions to reading and writing acquisition of European Portuguese

This study analyzed the relation and the specific influence of rapid naming (RN) on different reading (decoding accuracy and reading fluency) and writing components (spelling accuracy and fluency in composition) of European Portuguese. Moreover, it also compares the influence of Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tests (colors, digits) and of a Rapid Alternating Stimulus (RAS) test (shapes and colors). In a sample composed by normally achieving children, 70 in the first grade and 69 in the second grade, the results show that, when phonemic awareness is controlled, RN is a significant concurrent predictor of reading and writing performance. Its impact occurs mainly on reading fluency and is carried out predominantly by the RAN digit test. Nevertheless, the RAN color test and the RAS shape and color test also significantly predicted reading and writing performance. The results also indicate that RN has less impact on writing than on reading, and that, when compared with phonemic awareness, it is associated with distinct written language components. When combined, the data obtained are consistent with the orthographic characteristics of European Portuguese.     

Margarita glasses and high heels: How attention to shape,age, and vocabulary impacts children's recognition of typical and atypical exemplars

Children's ability to recognize object shape is foundational for successful early word learning. However, the prototypical shape of objects may not be easily accessible—take margarita glasses, for instance. The current study examined 304 U.S. children 17- to 42-month-old (152 females) from 2017 to 2020, asking how shape, age, and vocabulary abilities predict recognition of everyday objects. Children's ability to recognize objects increases with age and vocabulary, replicating prior work. Moreover, performance was partially moderated by object's typicality and shape features, and children's own attention to shape (shape bias) may mediate the effect, especially with prototypically shaped objects. The current study highlights how both child-specific variables and context features interact to shape language abilities, underscoring the emergent and multi-causal nature of word learning.     

Salient and emerging developmental tasks in the transition to adulthood

Drawing on data from a normative sample of 205 children tracked into adulthood, this study examined the predictive links from 3 salient (friendship, academic, conduct) and 2 emerging (work, romantic) developmental tasks during the transition years around age 20 to adult adaptation 10 years later. Results (a) confirm the utility of salient developmental tasks for predicting adult success, (b) suggest that emerging domains have limited long-term predictive significance, and (c) more generally support a view that developmental tasks follow a course through life of waxing and waning salience and organization that has implications for future adaptation.     

Children's emotions and behaviors in response to infants' cries

Infant crying can elicit in others both a range of emotions and contrasting behavioral reactions, such as altruistic caregiving versus aggression. Variations in reactions to young infants' cries were examined in 60 children ranging in age from late preschool to preadolescence. Each child over-heard either a preterm or a full-term tape-recorded cry from an adjacent room. Then a mother, carrying her infant, came looking for her (previously) "crying" infant's bottle. Later each child was interviewed after hearing a tape recording of a preterm and a full-term cry. Children's emotions and behaviors thus were assessed in response to simulated, real distresses and hypothetical representations of distress. Children's self-reports of empathy, their verbalized intentions to help, their actual helping responses, and observers' ratings of negative emotion were common responses to cries at all ages. In addition there were significant increases with age in prosocial, behavioral interventions. Expressions of negative emotion were inversely related to subsequent forms of prosocial behavior that required direct interaction with the infant. The emotions and behaviors of most children were not influenced by whether they heard preterm or full-term cries. They were, however, able to discriminate between such cries and some articulated "theories" about the impact of the cries on the listener.     

Context-sensitive rules and word naming in Italian children

The present study examines the role of orthographic complexity on Italian children’s word reading. Two experiments are reported in which elementary school children (3rd and 5th graders) read aloud words containing simple or contextual letter-sound conversion rules. In Experiment 1, both groups of participants read words containing contextual rules more slowly and less accurately than words containing simple, non-contextual rules. Experiment 2 showed that the effect of rule complexity held for low but not high frequency words, on both reading speed and accuracy. No interactions with grade were found. This pattern is in line with previous findings on the effects of rule contextuality on adult performance [Burani, C. Barca, L. & Ellis, A. W. (2006). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 346–352]. Despite the regularity of the Italian orthography, the presence of complex rules influences both reading speed and accuracy of young readers. Moreover, the reading system of readers of a shallow orthography seems efficient from the first years of reading instruction.