Orthographic facilitation and phonological inhibition in spoken word recognition: A developmental study

We investigated the extent to which learning to read and write affects spoken word recognition. Previous studies have reported orthographic effects on spoken language in skilled readers. However, very few studies have addressed the development of these effects as a function of reading expertise. We therefore studied orthographic neighborhood (ON) and phonological neighborhood (PN) effects in spoken word recognition in beginning and advanced readers and in children with developmental dyslexia. We predicted that whereas both beginning and advanced readers would show normal PN effects, only advanced readers would show ON effects. The results confirmed these predictions. The size of the ON effect on spoken word recognition was strongly predicted by written language experience and proficiency. In contrast, the size of the PN effect was not affected by reading level. Moreover, dyslexic readers showed no orthographic effects on spoken word recognition. In sum, these data suggest that orthographic effects on spoken word recognition are not artifacts of some uncontrolled spoken language property but reflect a genuine influence of orthographic information on spoken word recognition.     

A developmental study of proverb comprehension

Growth in proverb comprehension was hypothesized to result from the gradual emergence of cognitive abilities reflected in a sequence of increasingly complex abilities: story matching, transfer of relations, desymbolization, proverb matching, and paraphrase. Items for these abilities for each of 10 proverbs of two structural types were administered in three test sessions to 438 students in grades three to seven. An analogy subtest was used to measure general intelligence. ANOVA yielded significant main effects for grade, tasks, and proverbs (all p's less than .01). A significant task x proverb interaction (p less than .01) revealed the difficulty of precise control over the language of the items. Proverb structure had no measurable impact on difficulty. Analogy score was a significant factor in performance (p less than .01) but not as potent as age (p less than .01). The sequential order of abilities received only weak confirmation, though tasks did correlate among themselves with medium strength (r's = .50-.70). Individual interviews added a qualitative dimension to the findings. The suitability of cognitive hierarchical models for proverb comprehension was questioned.     

A developmental study of school theft

Two hundred students in grades 4-8 and 10 participated in a study of school theft. Students responded to a four-part questionnaire designed to measure perceptions of theft incidence and seriousness, personal responsibility for correcting theft, causal attributions of theft, and perceived consequences of thievery. A main grade effect was observed for personal responsibility and consequences, but represented counter directions. Eighth graders reported the highest incidence of theft, and females prescribed harsher penalties for theft. Results only weakly support a developmental interpretation of school theft patterns. Overall, students uniformly report that theft is a major problem in their schools.     

Learning the functional significance of mnemonic actions: A microgenetic study of strategy acquisition

How children learn to use memory strategies in a microgenetic investigation of learning and metacognition is examined. Seven- and eight-year-olds were given two memory trials with 24 pictures on each of 5 consecutive days. Days 1 and 2 were baseline, practice trials; Day 3 included strategy training; and Days 4 and 5 were unprompted tests of strategy maintenance. All children were taught how to label, rehearse, and group the pictures as well as to self-test their own memories and use blocked recall. Half of the children were shown the actions and told to do them; the other half received elaborated feedback on the usefulness and appropriateness of the techniques for remembering. The elaborated instructional group exhibited significantly greater recall, clustering, strategic study behavior, and metamemory regarding the mnemonic techniques than the other group. Path analysis provided evidence of a causal role of training and metacognitive awareness that mediated the use of sorting and higher recall. The study illustrates how learning the significance and utility of mnemonic techniques can influence children's acquisition of the tactics as self-controlled strategies. In addition, the microgenetic method affords patterns of data across time and experience that permit richer interpretations of strategy learning and memory development.     

Olfactory categorization: A developmental study

This study examined the ability of children to classify fruit and flower odors. We asked four groups of children (4-11years of age) and a group of adults to identify, categorize, and evaluate the edibility, liking, and typicality of 12 fruit and flower odors. Results showed an increase in interindividual agreement with age for the taxonomic (fruit/flower) and function-based (edible/nonedible) categories but not for the hedonic component. So, it seems that this hedonic component is not the explicit basis for this increase in interindividual agreement when categorizing an odor as a fruit/flower odor or as being edible or nonedible. An age-related trend was also observed on the typicality scores: The youngest group of children did not show a typicality gradient, but all of the other groups did. Blackcurrant and lemon were rated as the most typical fruit odors, whereas raspberry and peach were rated as the least typical. For flower odorants, results were not as clear, yet it seems that for all groups lavender was considered as quite typical.     

A developmental study of visual search behavior

Children in second, fourth and sixth grades and college sophomores were compared on a visual search and scanning task under three experimental conditions. In Condition I, a single target letter was sought in a list of letters of low visual confusability. In Condition II, two target letters were sought but only one appeared in a given list. In Condition III, a single target letter was sought in a list of letters of high confusability. Search time decreased with age in all three tasks. Searching for two targets was no harder than searching for one. A highly confusable visual context increased search time at all age levels.     

A developmental study of visual search behavior

Children in second, fourth and sixth grades and college sophomores were compared on a visual search and scanning task under three experimental condilions. In Condition I, a single target letter was sought in a list of letters of low visual confusability. In Condition II, two target letters were sought but only one appeared in a given list. In Condition III, a single target letter was sought in a list of letters of high confusability. Search time decreased with age in all three tasks. Searching for two targets was no harder than searching for one. A highly confusable visual context increased search time at all age levels.     

Conceptual implicit memory: A developmental study

The widely accepted standpoint that implicit memory emerges earlier in development than explicit memory, and is more stable from childhood to adult age, is based on experimental data essentially collected in perceptual tasks. The present study was aimed at investigating whether these findings still hold when a more conceptual task is used. We compared the performance of children at two age levels (2nd and 4th grades) on a category-exemplar generation task. Results showed that performances of the two groups were comparable when the target items were typical of their categories, as in Experiment 2, and for a subset of the items in Experiment 1. However, the older children outperformed the younger children in Experiment 1 when the items selected were atypical of their categories. Interpretations of these findings are discussed.Preparation of this article was supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (URA CNRS 316 and 1838), the Université de Bourgogne, and the Université René-Descartes     

A developmental study of the auditory Stroop effect

A pediatric auditory version of the Stroop procedure was developed and administered to 48 normal children from 3 to 6 years of age. Our purpose was to define the developmental course characterizing interaction between auditory and semantic speech dimensions in young children. The procedure was a reaction time (RT) task that required children to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to words spoken by a male or a female voice. Children were instructed to ignore what was said and to push the "Mommy" button if Mommy was talking or the "Daddy" button if Daddy was talking. Performance was obtained for words with neutral, congruent, and conflicting semantic content. Preschool children manifested processing dependencies that were similar to those observed in adults on the visual Stroop procedure. Conflict between semantic and auditory dimensions significantly increased RT and congruence between the two dimensions significantly decreased RT relative to the neutral condition. The pattern of results indicated that the meaning of words was processed automatically in the normal children. The magnitude of the Stroop effect reflected developmental change with increasing age.     

A developmental study of factors influencing discrimination transfer

Reversal and non-reversal shifts were studied in rural Mexican children ranging in age from 4–10 years. Experimental variations within each group were arranged to provide for evaluation of the influence of temporal pairing and the presence of common attributes in different discriminanda on transfer. Under some presentation conditions, all of the groups studied manifested independent learning of subproblems which are ordinarily thought of as constituting a single problem by experimenters. The contributions of the various experimental factors change with age in ways that are consistent with a general “single-unit to mediational” formulation, but the details of the mediational behavior are not fully describable by any currently formulated theory.     

A developmental study of learning disabilities and memory

Seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old learning-disabled (LD) and non-learning-disabled (NORM) children were presented specially structured lists of 38 words each and tested for free recall. Each list contained only four semantically related words. Two of the four related words were presented contiguously (serial positions 9 and 10) and the other two words were spaced (serial positions 20 and 30). All children recalled disproportionately more adjacent words (item 9 or 10) than any other words. Spaced words (items 20 and 30) were less likely to be recalled by the younger children than by the older children and by the LDs than by the NORMS. These findings provided support for the distinction between automatic and purposive semantic processing. NORMs' recall was governed by purposive semantic processing to a greater extent than was LDs' recall. However, no group or age differences were observed in automatic semantic processing.     

A developmental study of recognition of pictures and nouns

Children at four age levels (4, 6, 8, and 10 years) were given continuous recognition tasks using concrete noun, abstract noun, and pictorial stimuli in a 4 × 3 factorial design. Pictures were recognized significantly better than concrete and abstract nouns at the 4- and 6-year age levels and significantly better than abstract nouns at the 8- and 10-year age levels. This supported Paivio's contention that pictures are easier to remember than words because of a greater possibility of dual encoding, while Rohwer's contention that there is a shift in recognition memory development received no support. There were no significant differences between recognition of concrete and abstract nouns at any age level, which opposed the findings from adult studies and suggested that Paivio's theoretical orientation would have to be extended in order to account for developmental data. Recognition for both concrete and abstract nouns was found to be linear and increasing significantly with age, but no age trends for picture recognition were found.     

Orthographic-morphemic factors in reading: A developmental study

Children from grades 3, 5 and 7, and adults were given a lexical decision task to investigate the development of the use of a lexical access and storage code: the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS; Taft, 1979). This structure approximates the base morpheme of a word and comprises the initial vowel-plus-consonant unit of a word (e.g., RUD is the BOSS of RUDE, MAD the BOSS of MADE). Stimuli were letter-strings, equally divided into three word and three nonword conditions. BOSS was manipulated in word and nonword conditions and compared to words of same or higher frequency or nonwords. All nonword decisions took longer than word decisions, suggesting an age-invariant exhaustive lexical search. Relatively larger word/nonword differences for younger children were attributed to different bases of lexical distinctions. The availability of a BOSS-based lexical file was apparent at all ages although utilization of a BOSS-mediated code seems to emerge gradually.