Emergent literacy and early writing skills

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = +/- .03) who were followed longitudinally from preschool to the end of the first grade of primary school. Their early writing abilities (orthographic correctness in writing individual words) and their advanced writing abilities (orthographic correctness in text writing) were tested at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Multiple stepwise and logistic regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the predictive capacities of emergent literacy abilities on early and advanced writing competences. Results show that notational competence is a strong predictor of early writing skills and that phonological competence only has an effect insofar as it is integrated with notational competence. Emergent literacy competences do not significantly predict orthographic errors in advanced text writing. This research allows for reconsideration of the importance of phonological awareness and gives a central role to notational competence in predicting early writing competence.     

The impact of early maternal verbal scaffolding and child language abilities on later decoding and reading comprehension skills

This study examined, via structural equation modeling, early predictors of children's 8 year reading decoding and 10 year comprehension at later school age. Maternal verbal scaffolding indirectly influenced both decoding and comprehension, through its support of children's language abilities at 3 and 4 years of age. Additionally, there was a trend for a direct effect of 4 year child language on reading comprehension at 10 years. As maternal verbal scaffolding was assessed during every day routines, this suggests that rich language input in the broad social context of the home promotes language and, in turn, later reading skills. Given that maternal verbal scaffolding can be enhanced through interventions, these results have important educational implications.     

Early language and the development of children's reading skills

There is considerable agreement that vocabulary plays a central role in reading acquisition, but there is less agreement about whether this association is direct or indirect through phonological and print-related knowledge. Longitudinal data from 77 African-American children were analyzed to examine the relationship between language skills, phonological knowledge and print processing skills at pre-kindergarten and kindergarten with reading at pre-kindergarten through second grade. Analyses indicated that home and child care experiences were related to reading indirectly through language and that language and phonological knowledge were both directly related to acquisition of reading skill. This study of African-American children and previous studies of lower- and middle-income children indicate both language and phonological skills play an important role in children becoming successful readers, and that experiences at home and in child care during in early childhood play a role in the acquisition of reading through their enhancement of early language and phonological skills.     

The role of conceptual recoding in reducing children's retroactive interference

Reductions in children's retroactive interference were examined with conceptual recoding. Children learned two 10-item lists of toys; items on the 2nd list could also be classified as vehicles. Some children were not told about this 2nd category, whereas others were told either at the end of acquisition or just prior to the retention test 24 hr later. The results showed that (a) children benefited from the recoding instruction, (b) younger but not older children failed to benefit from the recoding manipulation when it occurred just prior to the retention test, and (c) recoding reduced retroactive interference primarily through affecting storage processes. These results provide new evidence concerning the importance of making information distinctive in storage in children's retention.     

The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development

Recent research using both naturalistic and experimental methods has found that the vast majority of young children's early language is organized around concrete, item-based linguistic schemas. From this beginning, children then construct more abstract and adult-like linguistic constructions, but only gradually and in piecemeal fashion. These new data present significant problems for nativist accounts of children's language development that use adult-like linguistic categories, structures and formal grammars as analytical tools. Instead, the best account of these data is provided by a usage-based model in which children imitatively learn concrete linguistic expressions from the language they hear around them, and then - using their general cognitive and social-cognitive skills - categorize, schematize and creatively combine these individually learned expressions and structures.     

The development of the SNARC effect: evidence for early verbal coding

In a recent study, Gevers and colleagues (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 139, pp. 180-190) showed that the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect in adults results not only from spatial coding of magnitude (e.g., mental number line hypothesis) but also from verbal coding. Because children are surrounded by rulers, number lines, and the like in the classroom, it is intuitively appealing to assume that they first use their mental number line to represent numbers and that only later in development a verbal recoding of magnitude information takes place. However, this hypothesis has never been tested. The goal of the current study was to define the developmental pattern of both accounts (spatial and verbal) in explaining the SNARC effect. To this end, 9- and 11-year-olds were tested in a magnitude comparison task. Surprisingly, clear and robust evidence for verbal coding of magnitude information was observed in both age groups. Our results imply that the ability to use verbal coding of magnitude information is robustly present early in formal schooling.     

The development of children’s early memory skills

A multitask battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months of age. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children’s Elicited Imitation task performance and whether the patterns of association varied across the different ages. Language ability emerged as a predictor of immediate Elicited Imitation performance by 24 months of age and predicted delayed performance at each age. In addition to the contributions of language, children’s abilities to search for and retrieve toys in the deliberate memory task were associated with their immediate Elicited Imitation performance at each age. In addition to language, working memory was positively associated with aspects of both immediate and delayed performance at all ages. The extent to which it was possible to replicate and extend previous cross-sectional work in this longitudinal study is discussed.     

Sociocultural influences on the development of verbal mediation: Private speech and phonological recoding in Saudi Arabian and British samples

Cross-national stability in private speech (PS) and short-term memory was investigated in Saudi Arabian (n = 63) and British (n = 58) 4- to 8-year-olds. Assumed differences in child-adult interaction between the 2 nationality groups led to predictions of Gender x Nationality interactions in the development of verbal mediation. British boys used more self-regulatory PS than British girls, whereas there was no such difference for the Saudi group. When age, verbal ability, and social speech were controlled, boys used slightly more self-regulatory PS than girls. Self-regulatory PS was related to children's use of phonological recoding of visually presented material in a short-term memory task, suggesting that PS and phonological recoding represent different facets of a domain-general transition toward verbal mediation in early childhood.     

Linking teachers' memory-relevant language and the development of children's memory skills

This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the development of skills for remembering, 107 first graders were assessed 3 times with a broad set of tasks, while extensive observations were made in the 14 classrooms from which these children were sampled. When the participating teachers were classified as high or low in terms of their "mnemonic orientation," in part on the basis of their use of metacognitive information and requests for deliberate remembering during instruction in language arts and mathematics, differences were observed in the use of mnemonic techniques by the children in their classes. By the end of the year, the children drawn from these 2 groups of classrooms differed in their spontaneous use of simple behavioral strategies for remembering and in their response to training in more complex verbally based mnemonic techniques.     

The impact of maternal employment on children's perceptions of parents and personal development

This study assessed the impact of maternal employment on young adolescents' self-concept, school achievement, vocational development, and the perceptions of their parents. It also assessed the impact of maternal employment in nonintact homes. Multivariate F tests indicated no significant differences in the subjects' perceptions of either parent or in their educational and vocational development that could be attributed to maternal employment. Similar results were reported in nonintact families.     

The effects of self-selection on trainees' verbal helping skills performance

Self-selected paraprofessional trainees enrolled in a helping skills training program participated in a 6-minute pretraining helping interview from which their frequency of continuing responses was obtained. Continuing responses allow helpees to present their concerns in a nonthreatening, supportive environment and are important in the relationship establishing stage of the helping process. For data analysis purposes only, trainees were divided into three groups, a high, medium, and low group, based on the frequency of continuing responses made. Following training, at posttest, no significant differences were found among the three groups on the amount of continuing responses made during a second identical 6-minute interview. Implications for various selection procedures and training are discussed.     

Sex differences in early verbal and non‐verbal cognitive development

The present study of over 3000 2‐year‐old twin pairs used a sex‐limitation model to examine genetic and environmental origins of sex differences in verbal and non‐verbal cognitive ability. Girls scored significantly higher on both measures (p<0.0001), although gender only accounted for approximately 3% of the variance in verbal ability and 1% of the variance in non‐verbal cognitive ability. For the verbal measure boys showed greater heritability than girls. Also the twin‐pair correlation is significantly lower for opposite‐sex twins than for non‐identical same‐sex twins. This indicates that individual differences in verbal ability include some sex‐specific factors. Non‐verbal cognitive ability did not differ in aetiology for boys and girls. We conclude that genetic and environmental influences differ for girls and boys for early verbal but not non‐verbal development.     

Genetic influences on the development of spatial skills during early adolescence

The course of development of skill at face encoding is disrupted in early adolescence. Evidence is provided that the timing of this disruption is under genetic control. Regardless of their age, girls in the midst of pubertal change encode faces less efficiently than prepubescent or postpubescent controls. This maturational influence on face encoding is contrasted with a different effect of pubertal development on another visuo-spatial ability, performance on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Regardless of their pubertal status at time of testing, girls who mature earlier are disadvantaged on EFT compared to those who mature later. The results for EFT replicate earlier findings on the relation between individual differences in the age at which adolescence begins and certain spatial skills. Several possible explanations for each of these effects—that of maturational status on face encoding and that of maturation rate on EFT—are discussed. Consideration of the relation between physical and mental growth is advocated as a source of constraints on explanations of cognitive development.     

The impact of verbal instructions on goal-directed behaviour

It is common to use verbal instructions when performing complex tasks. To evaluate how such instructions contribute to cognitive control, mixing costs (as a measure of sustained concentration on task) were evaluated in two task-switching experiments combining the list and alternating runs paradigms. Participants responded to bivalent stimuli according to a characteristic explicitly defined by a visually presented instructional cue. The processing of the cue was conducted under four conditions across the two experiments: Silent Reading, Reading Aloud, Articulatory Suppression, and dual mode (visual and audio) presentation. The type of cue processing produced a substantial impact on the mixing costs, where its magnitude was greatest with articulatory suppression and minimal with reading aloud and dual mode presentations. Interestingly, silently reading the cue only provided medium levels of mixing cost. The experiments demonstrate that relevant verbal instructions boost sustained concentration on task goals when maintaining multiple tasks.     

Improving the writing skills of college students

Advanced writing skills are an important aspect of academic performance as well as of subsequent work- related performance. However, American students rarely attain advanced scores on assessments of writing skills (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2002). In order to achieve higher levels of writing performance, the working memory demands of writing processes should be reduced so that executive attention is free to coordinate interactions among them. This can in theory be achieved through deliberate practice that trains writers to develop executive control through repeated opportunities to write and through timely and relevant feedback. Automated essay scoring software may offer a way to alleviate the intensive grading demands placed on instructors and, thereby, substantially increase the amount of writing practice that students receive.     

The effects of verbal information on children's fear beliefs about social situations

Two experiments explored the role of verbal information in changing children's fear-related beliefs about social situations. In Experiment 1, 118 6- to 8- and 12- to 13-year-olds heard positive, negative, or no information about individuals' experiences of three social situations. Fear beliefs regarding each situation were assessed before and after this manipulation. Verbal information had no significant influence on children's fear beliefs. In Experiment 2, the same paradigm was used with 80 12- to 13-year-olds, but the information took the form of multiple attitude statements about the situations expressed by groups of peers, older children, or adults. An affective priming task of implicit attitudes was used to complement the explicit questions about fear beliefs. Negative information influenced both explicit and implicit fear beliefs. The source of information and the child's own social anxiety did not moderate these effects. Implications for our understanding of the socialisation of childhood fears are discussed.