Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood…

The present study examined whether temporal processing (TP) is associated with reading of a non-alphabetic script, that is, Chinese. A total of 126 primary school-aged Chinese children from Taiwan (63 children with dyslexia) completed cross-modal, visual, and auditory temporal order judgment tasks and measures of Chinese reading and…

Pressure on music educators to accommodate reading initiatives in their schools continues to challenge genuine music-learning experiences. Children are taken out of music classrooms for additional reading time, although mounting research informs us of the value of music as a formidable avenue for developing crucial auditory skills needed for…

This article considers the concepts of "learning style" and "learning strategy". The former connotes an inbuilt trait which tends to remain fundamental to the way an individual approaches learning. The latter refers to a set of consciously-acquired and applied approaches or tactics designed to achieve a learning task. The article relates these…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of familiarity with the sound of a melody on children's performance of the melody. Children in kindergarten through fourth grade (N = 97) with no previous formal instrumental instruction were taught to play a four-measure melody on a keyboard during an individual instruction session. Before…

In the present study, we investigated the degree to which children's inference generation ability generalises across different media and predicts narrative comprehension over and above basic language skills and vocabulary. To address both aims, we followed two cohorts of children aged 4 and 6 as they turned 6 and 8 years old, respectively. At each…

Discusses the pros and cons of phonics for spelling. (MP)

A total of 320 subjects in five grades (two, four, six, eight, ten) and from two types of school settings (middle-class and disadvantaged) were studied. Subjects learned eight-pair lists of familiar nouns in a standard paired-associates task. Each subject learned two lists, one presented visually and the other, aurally. Performance on the visual…

In studies with 22 normal hearing adults and two hearing impaired children (12-13 years old), speech was presented under different degrees of optical distortion. (CL)

The authors summarize results of their own and others' research of auditory language processing deficits associated with learning disabilities in children and adolescents. Among findings reported are that learning disabled children exhibit delays in the acquisition of morphological and syntactic rules, delays in logical growth, short-term memory…

The present experiment investigated memory attribute dominance in young children by measuring false recognition responses to associatively and acoustically related words. Second- and sixth-grade children, half of whom were high SES and half low SES, served as subjects. Following Underwood (1969), a shift from acoustic to associative memory…