Phonemic and graphemic consistency: Effects on decoding for German and American children

Speed, accuracy, and types of errors in decoding lists of words and pseudo words and performance in two phonemic awareness tasks were assessed for German and American children in the first and second grades. German children were significantly better than American children only in pseudo word decoding measures across grades. Between group analyses showed that American children committed more vowel and word substitution errors in both decoding accuracy tasks than German children. Word substitution errors were more likely in word decoding than in pseudo word decoding for children in both languages. Within group analyses indicate that variance in decoding errors and speed accounted for by word substitution versus nonword and vowel versus consonant errors differed dependent on grade and whether real or pseudo words were read. Results suggest successful reading in English depends upon more complex grapheme to phoneme correspondence rules than does reading in German.     

How Toddler Peers Generate Coordinated Action: A Cross-Cultural Exploration

A developmental pathway is proposed for toddlers' mastery of the skills involved in generating non-ritualized forms of cooperative coordinated action with peers and the studies of USA toddlers supporting this pathway reviewed. The proposed pathway posits (a) a central role for nonverbal imitative acts in enabling toddlers to generate together extended bouts of nonverbal coordinated action and (b) a central role for these bouts of imitative coordinated action in facilitating toddlers' development of verbal means of coordinating action. This pathway then guides an analysis of the development and functions of imitative acts among toddler peers from a quite different cultural context-the Seltaman people of Papua New Guinea. Twelve Seltaman toddlers were observed with peers at near-weekly intervals over a six-month period. Ready imitation of one another emerged among the Seltaman toddlers during the same developmental period as for USA toddlers and functioned similarly to generate extended bouts of coordinated action-reciprocal imitation games. The themes of the reciprocal imitation games, however, varied in line with the socialization practices and characteristic play settings of the two cultures. These findings provide further support for the proposition that these imitative acts form part of a distinctly human pathway of development related to the emergence of human language.