The link between working memory and academic achievement has been demonstrated across many research studies, with children who have lower working memory capacity typically also having lower levels of achievement in both literacy and numeracy. However, much of this research has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and…

The area of individual differences (ID) in second language (L2) has been a point of interest for many researchers; however, the impact of ID on the writing performance of L2 learners has not been explored exhaustively. Only a limited number of studies have examined the role of language aptitude, vocabulary size, and working memory (WM) on L2…

Whereas accuracy is used as an indicator of cognitive flexibility in preschool-age children, reaction time (RT), or a combination of accuracy and RT, provide better indices of performance as children transition to school. Theoretical models and cross-sectional studies suggest that a speed-accuracy tradeoff may be operating across this transition,…

Research suggests a role for aspects of the working memory system in reading. While much of the evidence points to a role for working memory capacity and the phonological loop, more recent work indicates a role for the central executive component, although findings remain unclear. There is an identified need for a reliable screening measure for…

The potential benefits and mechanistic effects of working memory training (WMT) in children are the subject of much research and debate. We show that after five weeks of school-based, adaptive WMT 6-9 year-old primary school children had greater activity in prefrontal and striatal brain regions, higher task accuracy, and reduced intra-individual…

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet)…

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…

Cognitive predictors of reading are well known, but less is understood about the roles of "noncognitive" factors, including emotional variables such as anxiety. While "math" anxiety has been a focus of study, its analogue in the reading literature is understudied. We assessed struggling fourth and fifth graders (n = 272) on…

Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper…

Children's early math abilities have been claimed to depend differentially on various cognitive competencies (e.g., core number skills, working memory, and general math and reading abilities). Clarifying the relative importance of these different cognitive markers in predicting key early math skills would provide a conceptual framework for…

Purpose: The present study examined whether engaging working memory in a secondary task benefits speech fluency. Effects of dual-task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and errors were examined with respect to predictions derived from three related theoretical accounts of disfluencies. Method: Nineteen adults who stutter and twenty adults who do…

The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between NL (Native Language: Polish) phonological processing skills (verbal and phonological short-term memory, phoneme segmentation and blending, rapid automatised naming (RAN)) and the accuracy and fluency of NL and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) word and nonword decoding and word…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

Previous research has shown that children aged 4-5 years, but not 2-3 years, show adult-like interference from a partner when performing a joint task (Milward, Kita, & Apperly, 2014). This raises questions about the cognitive skills involved in the development of such "corepresentation (CR)" of a partner (Sebanz, Knoblich, &…

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with…