This study examined the independent contribution of morphological awareness and orthographic awareness in reading comprehension, controlling for working memory and reading fluency in Arabic-speaking children. Participants (N = 244) from grades four and five, were classified into typical comprehenders (n = 207) and poor comprehenders (n = 37). All…

The present study examined individual differences in 3 cognitive abilities: attention control (AC), working memory capacity (WMC), and fluid intelligence (gF) as they relate the tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and the regulation of arousal. Cognitive abilities were measured with a battery of 9 laboratory tasks, TUTs were…

The present study examined the mediating role of fluid intelligence between working memory (WM) and academic achievement and tested the invariance of this model across gender in a random sample of university students (N = 560, 228 boys & 332 girls). Heart and Flower task (Diamond, 2013) and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices[superscript TM]…

This study explored the role of growth in the executive components of working memory (WM) on second language (L2) mathematical problem-solving in elementary school children who are emerging bilinguals whose first language (L1) is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 429) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of math, reading,…

Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or "meta-working memory," which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use…

When children are confronted with an emotional problem, affective flexibility mobilizes their cognitive and emotional resources to optimally address it. We investigated the contribution of executive functions to cognitive and affective flexibility in preschoolers. We assessed affective flexibility in 67 preschoolers (30 girls; M[subscript months]…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

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…

This longitudinal study examines the relative importance of counting ability, additive reasoning, and working memory in children's mathematical achievement (calculation and story problem solving). In Hong Kong, 115 Chinese children aged 6 years old participated in 2 waves of assessments (T1 = first grade and T2 = second grade). Multiple regression…

Problem solving has been a core theme in education for several decades. Educators and policy makers agree on the importance of the role of problem solving skills for school and real life success. A primary purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive abilities on mathematical problem solving performance of elementary…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…

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,…

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…