Visuo-spatial reasoning tests, such as Raven's matrices, Cattell's culture-fair test, or various subtests of the Wechsler scales, are frequently used to estimate intelligence scores in the context of inter-racial comparisons. This has led to several high-profile works claiming that certain ethnic groups have lower intelligence than others,…

A wide share of secondary school children does not reach the expected competence level in reading. These children could benefit from more efficient intervention responses, providing a better understanding of their cognitive weaknesses/deficits. Our aim was to explore the cognitive heterogeneity of a population of poor readers identified from a…

More than 50 years since the introduction of the concept of divergent production, little progress has been made in the development of parsimonious theoretical models that sufficiently explain creativity. Recently, the optimal foraging theory has been used to explain the search for items in memory tasks, suggesting the correspondence between the…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

The study aimed to investigate the effect of a training program on improving working memory for students with learning difficulties in reading Arabic. The study sample consisted of (10) students with learning disabilities from Basic Education students from the fifth and sixth grades, and those between the ages (10-11) years as a pilot group and…

The relationships among visual and auditory temporal processing, rapid naming, and oral reading fluency in Chinese children with and without dyslexia were examined. Primary school-aged Chinese children with dyslexia (N = 47) and chronological-age-matched controls (N = 47) were recruited. Temporal processing, rapid naming, oral reading fluency,…

Purpose: Multiple factors impact reading acquisition in individuals with reading disability, including genetic disorders such as Williams syndrome (WS). Despite a relative strength in oral language, individuals with WS usually have an intellectual disability and tend to display deficits in areas associated with reading. There is substantial…

Recent advances in understanding visual working memory, the limited information held in mind for use in ongoing processing, are extended here to examine auditory working memory development. Research with arrays of visual objects has shown how to distinguish the capacity, in terms of the "number" of objects retained, from the…

Learning to read two scripts at a young age is a demanding task. This study aims to develop games for building fundamental code-related emergent literacy skills among biscriptal preschoolers. We developed five games and tested them on a sample of 102 Chinese kindergarteners. The participants were aged 4 to 5 years and were learning English as a…

This study examined the extent to which Chinese children with dyslexia show temporal processing deficits in addition to deficits in various forms of attention. In total, 104 Chinese children in primary school (Grades 3-6) were recruited in Taiwan. Half of the children were identified as having dyslexia, and the other half were typically developing…

Background: Outcomes of static tests provide an indication of what children have learned in the past, up to the moment of testing, and can therefore underestimate the cognitive abilities of atypically developing children, such as children with language difficulties. In contrast, dynamic tests aim to examine children's potential for learning. The…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

A group of 50 good readers and a group of 50 poor readers of Grade 5 matched for age and intelligence and selected on the basis of their proficiency in reading comprehension were tested for their competence in word reading and the process of planning at three different levels, namely, perceptual, memory and conceptual in order to study the…

Working memory (WM) is a recognised component of executive function and has undergone scrutiny in terms of bilingual and monolingual performance comparisons. Research to date, however, has not consistently replicated the presence of bilingual advantage. The present study examined short-term (STM) and WM in immersion-educated children and a matched…