This study investigated the role of domain-specific and domain-general factors in predicting early literacy skills in Italian children. A sample of 239 first-grade students was evaluated using a broad neuropsychological battery to assess their cognitive skills. The results showed that phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, speed of…

A number of previous studies have identified cognitive deficits in developmental dyscalculia (DD). Yet, most of these studies were in alphabetic languages, whereas few of them examined Chinese DD. Here, we conducted a study aiming to determine the cognitive factors associated with DD in Chinese children. Five candidate cognitive factors of…

Copying characters presented previously (delayed copying) is an important skill in Chinese literacy acquisition. The relations of delayed copying and a set of literacy-related skills (including vocabulary knowledge, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness), visual-orthographic judgment,…

Despite the important role assigned to analogical reasoning (AR) in cognition and language, the relationship between this ability and language skills in the emergent literacy period has not been sufficiently studied, especially in Spanish speakers. To explore this link, we examined two modalities of AR (verbal and non-verbal) as predictors of…

In this study, we examined the mechanism for the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading in a group of Hong Kong primary school children when they were in grade two (n = 176, mean age = 8.07) and grade three (n = 163, mean age = 9.02). The results showed that morphological awareness, morpheme family size and the…

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…

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…

Literacy levels in Africa are low, and school instruction outcomes are not promising. Africa also has a disproportionate number of unschooled children. Phonological awareness (PA), especially phoneme awareness, is critically associated with literacy, but there is little evidence about whether PA is gained through literacy, schooling, or both,…

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) robustly predicts early reading abilities across languages, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study found that RAN associated significantly with processing speed but not with phonological awareness or orthographic knowledge in 89 Hong Kong Chinese second-graders. RAN overlaps more with processing…

The present study investigated the role of both cognitive and linguistic predictors in basic arithmetic skills (i.e., addition and subtraction) in 69 first-language (L1) learners and 60 second-language (L2) learners from the second grade of primary schools in the Netherlands. All children were tested on non-verbal intelligence, working memory,…

In the context of observations that students lack mastery of elementary reading comprehension in Malayalam even by the end of 5-7 years of formal schooling, this study applies multiple regression analysis for reading comprehension. Longitudinal survey data from a representative sample of 159 lower primary students from grade 2 to 4 revealed…

The home numeracy environment (i.e., parents' numeracy expectations and activities), is related to early numeracy in young children. As recent studies have shown that both cognitive and linguistic factors play an important role in predicting numeracy development, it may be assumed that rather than the home "numeracy" environment, the…

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence…

In this study, we investigated the characteristics of cognitive abilities as predictors of Korean reading and spelling ability, and the characteristics of the cognition of reading difficulty in Korean. In 103 Korean third-grade children, we tested ability to read and spell, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary size, phonological cognitive…