Relations between enabling skills and reading comprehension: a follow-up study of Latvian students from first to second grade

In order to examine the relationships among various phonological skills and reading comprehension, Latvian children were followed from grade 1 to grade 2 and were tested with a battery of phonological, word reading, and reading comprehension tasks. A principal component analysis of the phonological tasks revealed three salient factors: a phonemic awareness factor, a rapid naming factor, and a short-term memory factor. In order to analyze the relationship between various phonological skills and reading comprehension, a structural modeling analysis was performed. Phonemic awareness and rapid naming explained approximately the same amount of unique variance in reading comprehension, but phonemic awareness had most predictive power indirectly via word decoding. Only rapid naming had a significant direct impact on reading comprehension.     

Working memory and individual differences in mathematics achievement: A longitudinal study from first grade to second grade

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between working memory and individual differences in mathematics. Working memory measures, comprising the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive, were administered at the start of first grade. Mathematics achievement was assessed 4 months later (at the middle of first grade) and 1 year later (at the start of second grade). Working memory was significantly related to mathematics achievement in both grades, showing that working memory clearly predicts later mathematics achievement. The central executive was a unique predictor of both first- and second-grade mathematics achievement. There were age-related differences with regard to the contribution of the slave systems to mathematics performance; the visuospatial sketchpad was a unique predictor of first-grade, but not second-grade, mathematics achievement, whereas the phonological loop emerged as a unique predictor of second-grade, but not first-grade, mathematics achievement.     

Speech-sound duration processing in a second language is specific to phonetic categories

The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential was used to determine the effect of native language, Russian, on the processing of speech-sound duration in a second language, Finnish, that uses duration as a cue for phonological distinction. The native-language effect was compared with Finnish vowels that either can or cannot be categorized using the Russian phonological system. The results showed that the duration-change MMN for the Finnish sounds that could be categorized through Russian was reduced in comparison with that for the Finnish sounds having no Russian equivalent. In the Finnish sounds that can be mapped through the Russian phonological system, the facilitation of the duration processing may be inhibited by the native Russian language. However, for the sounds that have no Russian equivalent, new vowel categories independent of the native Russian language have apparently been established, enabling a native-like duration processing of Finnish.     

The relationship between phonological processing and arithmetic in children with learning disabilities

Phonological processing skills have not only been shown to be important for reading skills, but also for arithmetic skills. Specifically, previous research in typically developing children has suggested that phonological processing skills may be more closely related to arithmetic problems that are solved through fact retrieval (e.g., remembering the solution from memory) than procedural computation (e.g., counting). However, the relationship between phonological processing and arithmetic in children with learning disabilities (LDs) has not been investigated. Yet, understanding these relationships in children with LDs is especially important because it can help elucidate the cognitive underpinnings of math difficulties, explain why reading and math disabilities frequently co-occur, and provide information on which cognitive skills to target for interventions. In 63 children with LDs, we examined the relationship between different phonological processing skills (phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and rapid serial naming) and arithmetic. We distinguished between arithmetic problems that tend to be solved with fact retrieval versus procedural computation to determine whether phonological processing skills are differentially related to these two arithmetic processes. We found that phonemic awareness, but not phonological memory or rapid serial naming, was related to arithmetic fact retrieval. We also found no association between any phonological processing skills and procedural computation. These results converge with prior research in typically developing children and suggest that phonemic awareness is also related to arithmetic fact retrieval in children with LD. These results raise the possibility that phonemic awareness training might improve both reading and arithmetic fact retrieval skills.

Research Highlights

• Relationships between phonological processing and various arithmetic skills were investigated in children with learning disabilities (LDs) for the first time.
• We found phonemic awareness was related to arithmetic involving fact retrieval, but not to arithmetic involving procedural computation in LDs.
• The results suggest that phonemic awareness is not only important to skilled reading, but also to some aspects of arithmetic.
• These results raise the question of whether intervention in phonemic awareness might improve arithmetic fact retrieval skills.

     

Epistemology and the law: why there is no epistemic mileage in legal cases

Philosophical Studies - The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of...     

Evidence of a shift from featural to configural face processing in infancy

Two experiments examined whether 4-, 6-, and 10-month-old infants process natural looking faces by feature, i.e. processing internal facial features independently of the facial context or holistically by processing the features in conjunction with the facial context. Infants were habituated to two faces and looking time was measured. After habituation they were tested with a habituation face, a switch-face, or a novel face. In the switch-faces, the eyes and mouth of the habituation faces were switched. The results showed that the 4-month-olds processed eyes and mouth by feature, whereas the 10-month-olds processed both features holistically. The 6-month-olds were in a transitional stage where they processed the mouth holistically but the eyes still as a feature. Thus, the results demonstrated a shift from featural to holistic processing in the age range of 4 to 10 months.     

The association between auditory memory span and speech rate in children from kindergarten to sixth grade.

This study reexamined the association between speech rate and memory span in children from kindergarten to sixth grade (N = 152) in order to potentially account for the inconsistencies within the published literature on this topic. Some of the inconsistencies in past research may reflect the different methods adopted in assessing speech rate. In particular, repeating word triples may itself involve memory demands, contaminating the correlation between speech rate and memory span in younger children. Analyses using composite speech rate and memory span measures showed that speech rate for word triples shared variance with memory span that was independent of speech rate for single words. Moreover, speech rate for word triples was largely redundant with age in explaining additional variation in memory span once the effects of speech rate for single words were controlled.     

Gender processing in first and second languages: the role of noun termination

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times were statistically identical for items from gender typical, ambiguous, and gender atypical groups. The 2 experiments with English bilinguals who had learned German as a second language (L2), however, provided evidence that the L2 word's termination plays a role in L2 gender processing. Participants were fastest when producing gender-marked noun phrases containing a noun with a gender typical termination and slowest when the noun had a gender atypical termination. Analogous results were obtained in the grammaticality judgment experiment. These findings support the assumption that there is interaction between the levels of phonological encoding and grammatical encoding at least in bilingual processing.     

Semantic and translation priming from a first language to a second and back: Making sense of the findings

The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L1 to L2 (meisje-GIRL) and from L2 to L1 (girl-MEISJE), using two different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (250 and 100 msec). Although translation priming from L1 to L2 was significantly stronger than priming from L2 to L1, the latter was significant as well. Two further experiments with the same word targets showed significant cross-language semantic priming in both directions ( jongen [boy]-GIRL; boy-MEISJE [GIRL]) and for both SOAs. These data suggest that L1 and L2 are represented by means of a similar lexico-semantic architecture in which L2 words are also able to rapidly activate semantic information, although to a lesser extent than L1 words are able to. This is consistent with models assuming quantitative rather than qualitative differences between L1 and L2 representations.     

The shift from a response strategy to object-in-place strategy during learning is accompanied by a matching shift in neural firing correlates in the hippocampus

Hippocampal-dependent tasks often involve specific associations among stimuli (including egocentric information), and such tasks are therefore prone to interference from irrelevant task strategies before a correct strategy is found. Using an object-place paired-associate task, we investigated changes in neural firing patterns in the hippocampus in association with a shift in strategy during learning. We used an object-place paired-associate task in which a pair of objects was presented in two different arms of a radial maze. Each object was associated with reward only in one of the arms, thus requiring the rats to consider both object identity and its location in the maze. Hippocampal neurons recorded in CA1 displayed a dynamic transition in their firing patterns during the acquisition of the task across days, and this corresponded to a shift in strategy manifested in behavioral data. Specifically, before the rats learned the task, they chose an object that maintained a particular egocentric relationship with their body (response strategy) irrespective of the object identity. However, as the animal acquired the task, it chose an object according to both its identity and the associated location in the maze (object-in-place strategy). We report that CA1 neurons in the hippocampus changed their prospective firing correlates according to the dominant strategy (i.e., response versus object-in-place strategy) employed at a given stage of learning. The results suggest that neural firing pattern in the hippocampus is heavily influenced by the task demand hypothesized by the animal and the firing pattern changes flexibly as the perceived task demand changes.An event often involves objects placed in particular locations. To form a cognitive representation of such an event, an animal needs to represent many heterogeneous pieces of information such as individual objects, their spatial locations, and also egocentric body movements associated with the navigation through the objects and locations. All the information then needs to be associated in a correct way (e.g., proper object-place association) for successful representation of the event. Processing only a subset of information successfully may lead to an error in identifying the correct event. It is believed that the hippocampus is essential for forming and retrieving such conjunctive representations among stimuli for processing events (O''Reilly and McClelland 1994).Due to its conjunctive information processing after receiving inputs from multiple sources (e.g., information for object recognition, egocentric memory, allocentric memory, etc.), the hippocampal system is prone to competition with other systems especially when a simpler strategy that requires information from a single source seems a viable option. Behavioral and pharmacological studies have supported this hypothesis (Packard and McGaugh 1996; Poldrack and Packard 2003). Physiologically, the influence of switching strategy on hippocampal neuronal firing has been documented in the literature and often tested in a plus maze. It has been shown, for example, that passing a common area of space using different task demands alters the firing properties of hippocampal neurons (Wood et al. 2000; Ferbinteanu and Shapiro 2003; Lee et al. 2006; Eschenko and Mizumori 2007). In most of these studies, however, rats were pre-trained before electrophysiological recordings were made and an experimenter enforced the change in task demand. Therefore, it has been difficult to investigate a naturally occurring competition between different strategies as learning proceeds and the resulting neural dynamics in the hippocampus especially when learning takes place for the first time.Using a hippocampal dependent task, we aimed to characterize such naturally occurring changes in hippocampal firing patterns as a wrong strategy is replaced by the correct strategy during learning. We also investigated the relationships between the changes in firing patterns and behavioral performance. We used a biconditional object-place paired-associate task for this purpose. We demonstrated previously that hippocampal lesioned rats were severely impaired in this task (Lee and Solivan 2008). In this task, two different objects are presented simultaneously as a pair, and rats are required to discriminate between the objects according to the location (an arm in a radial maze) in which they are presented. Once it enters an arm, the rat positions itself between two objects and must choose either the left or right direction toward either object to displace the object for obtaining a food reward. Since the relative object positions within an arm vary across trials, remembering the running direction in which a reward is found (i.e., response strategy) is meaningless and the rat must learn to pay attention to the object identity and its associated location in space (i.e., object-in-place strategy). In our previous studies (Lee and Solivan 2008, 2010; Jo and Lee 2010), we observed a strong competition in this task between a response strategy and object-in-place strategy. Normal rats used the response strategy before learning occurred, but exhibited a sharp transition to the object-in-place strategy in several days. The selective involvement of the hippocampus was strongly implicated in the task as the hippocampal lesioned rats show stereotypic egocentric responses (Lee and Solivan 2008). The current study aimed to find and characterize in detail matching neural correlates in the hippocampus in the object-place paired-associate task.     

The relations between phonological processing abilities and emerging individual differences in mathematical computation skills: a longitudinal study from second to fifth grades

The primary purpose of this longitudinal correlational study was to examine relations between phonological processing abilities and emerging individual differences in math computation skills and also to investigate the source of covariation between reading and math computation skills in a random sample (n = 201). Phonological memory, rate of access to phonological codes in long-term memory, and phonological awareness were uniquely associated with growth in estimated total number of computation procedures mastered (general computation skills) from 92.5 to 134.8 months in age, although the contributions of the first two abilities were developmentally limited. Phonological processing almost completely accounted for the associations between reading and general computation skills. Evidence of bidirectional relations between general computation skills and simple arithmetic problem solving speed was found.     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: phonological priming from the second to the first language

In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models.     

Forming a stable memory representation in the first year of life: why imitation is more than child's play

Although 9-month-old infants are capable of retaining temporally ordered information over long delays, this ability is relatively fragile. It may be possible to facilitate long-term retention by allowing infants to imitate event sequences immediately after their presentation. The effects of imitation on immediate and delayed recognition and on long-term recall were investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) and elicited imitation, respectively. Mnemonic facilitation resulting from the opportunity to imitate was apparent using both assessments. ERP assessments at immediate and delayed recognition tests suggested that infants who were allowed to imitate had stronger memory representations of familiar stimuli relative to infants who only viewed the presentation of the events. In addition, infants who were allowed to imitate evidenced higher levels of ordered recall after 1 month relative to infants who only watched the experimenter's demonstration. Therefore, imitation proved to have beneficial effects on explicit memory in 9(1/2)-month-olds, providing evidence of its effectiveness as a tool to augment mnemonic capabilities in infancy.     

New morbidity-problems and peer relations in a sample of Swedish primary school children: A follow-up from the first to third grade

The stability in the new morbidity-problem domains motor skills, reading/writing ability, behavioral–psychological–social function and concentration ability in school, and the stability of peer status and peer preferences as well as relationships between peer status and problems among boys and girls was studied in a sample of 81 Swedish primary school children. The children were rated by teachers and made peer nominations six months after school start, and in the third grade.
There was considerable stability in problems, while the stability in peer status was modest. There were marked gender differences. Boys in contrast to girls improved in motor skills from the first to the third grade, and boys had more concentration problems and multiple problems than girls in both grade 1 and 3. In the first grade, low peer acceptance in boys was accompanied by low motor skill. In the third grade, low peer acceptance in boys was accompanied by deficient concentration ability and externalizing problems. For girls, few relationships between low peer acceptance and problems emerged. Various explanations for these findings are discussed.     

Distraction from cognitive processing by emotional pictures: Preliminary evidence for an association with interactions between psychopathy-related traits in a non-clinical sample

In individuals with psychopathy, the presence of emotional stimuli implicates a relatively weak distraction from performing cognitive tasks. This study assessed whether there is also a relationship between specific combinations of psychopathy-related traits present in the general population and sensitivity of cognitive processing to distraction by emotional stimuli. The participants (N = 80) were screened for these traits using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and performed a classification task in the presence of pictures with a low or high arousal value. Emotional distraction (ED) was operationalized in terms of the response time on trials with high- versus low-arousal pictures. The interaction between affective-interpersonal and impulsive-antisocial traits was significantly associated with ED. This interaction reflected the fact that the association between affective-interpersonal traits (specifically fearlessness) and magnitude of ED was negative for individuals with relatively weak impulsive-antisocial traits (specifically carefree nonplanfulness) but positive for those with relatively strong impulsive-antisocial traits. These results suggest significant differences in vulnerability to ED as a function of the strength of specific combinations of psychopathy-related traits in non-clinical samples.     

About the relationship between basic numerical processing and arithmetics in early Alzheimer's disease--a follow-up study

We studied the relationship between basic numerical knowledge and arithmetics (facts and procedures) in early Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In most patients, basic numerical knowledge was found to be preserved, as reflected by low error rates, distance effect in number comparison, and subitizing in naming numerosities. However, within arithmetics, AD patients exhibited decreased fact and procedural knowledge. Interestingly, double dissociations were found not only between facts and procedures but also between basic numerical knowledge and arithmetics. Thus, our results suggest that basic numerical knowledge need not be a prerequisite for the maintenance of arithmetics, but rather corroborate calculation models that postulate the functional independence of its components. Further, we found patient specific error types which might serve to identify early AD. The follow-up about one year later indicated significant qualitative, but only marginal quantitative performance changes.     

Exploring replay value: shifts and continuities in user experiences between first and second exposure to an interactive story

While replay value is a common term in interactive entertainment, psychological research on its meaning in terms of user experiences is sparse. An exploratory experiment using the interactive drama "Fa?ade" was conducted (n=50) to examine shifts and continuities in entertainment-related user experiences between first and second exposure to the same system. A questionnaire with brief scales measuring various user-experience dimensions (interaction-related facets such as usability, flow, and presence, as well as narrative-related facets such as suspense and curiosity) was administered after the first and the second round of exposure. Findings suggest that replay produces gains in action-related experience components such as presence and effectance, whereas narrative-related experiences such as curiosity and suspense remain stable across exposures. Implications for theorizing on interactive entertainment experiences are discussed.