The relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second…

We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a…

The goal of this study was to examine the post-treatment development of word and pseudoword accuracy and fluency and its cognitive and linguistic predictors in Dutch children with dyslexia compared with typical readers in the upper primary grades. Word and pseudoword reading accuracy and fluency were assessed at the start and end of grade 5 and at…

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…

Two explanations for resolving dyslexia were investigated, one assuming resolving underlying deficits and another assuming compensatory mechanisms based on cognitive strengths. Thirty-six Dutch gifted secondary-school students with either persistent (n = 18) or resolving (n = 18) dyslexia participated. Groups, matched on IQ, were assessed on…

This study investigated how gifted children with dyslexia might be able to mask literacy problems and the role of possible compensatory mechanisms. The sample consisted of 121 Dutch primary school children that were divided over four groups (typically developing [TD] children, children with dyslexia, gifted children, gifted children with…

Beginning readers' reading latencies increase as words become longer. This length effect is believed to be a marker of a serial reading process. We examined the effects of visual and phonological skills on the length effect. Participants were 184 second-grade children who read 3- to 5-letter words and nonwords. Results indicated that reading…

To investigate underlying learning mechanisms in relation to the development of dyslexia, event-related potentials to visual standards were recorded in five-year-old pre-reading children at-risk for familial dyslexia (n=24) and their controls (n=14). At the end of second grade the children aged 8 years were regrouped into three groups according to…

We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers were uncertain they were more likely to produce…