The performance of children and young adults with Down syndrome (DS) on reading subskills and nonword reading was investigated. The performance of the participants with DS (N = 42) was compared to that of typically developing (N = 36) peers matched on fluid intelligence abilities. The study accounted for the different depths in orthography…

Although the link between developmental dyslexia and visual-spatial deficit has been recurrently highlighted, the relationship between visual-spatial abilities and reading performance is still a controversial issue, considering the orthographic variability of the language being learned. This study aimed to examine whether visuo-spatial abilities…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second…

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…

Background: Research has shown that paired associate learning (PAL) plays an important role in children's word reading across different languages. However, little is known about the construct of PAL and its relationship with word reading in Chinese children. Methods: A total of 204 second-year kindergarten children from Mainland China were…

We examined the cognitive, language, and instructional factors associated with reading ability in Williams syndrome (WS). Seventy 9-year-olds with WS completed standardized measures of real-word reading, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, phonological skills, listening comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, visual-spatial ability, verbal…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

The aim of the present study was to test environmental and cognitive variables as possible cross-domain predictors of early literacy and numeracy skills. One hundred forty-eight preschool children (mean age = 64.36 months ± 3.33) were enrolled in the study. The battery included a home literacy and home numeracy questionnaire, measures and…

Drawing on Geary's (1995) evolution-based model of cognitive and academic development, this study investigated the relation between biologically primary skills (vocabulary, executive functions, and visual-spatial processing) and subsequent word reading and calculation. It also examined the extent to which these relations were mediated by…

This study investigated the construct of paired associate learning (PAL) and its associations with Chinese word writing in kindergarten children. A total of 188 Chinese children (95 boys, mean age = 5.65 years; SD = 0.34) from [Xi'an], Mainland China in the third year of kindergarten participated in this study. Children were assessed on measures…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

We evaluated phonological and visuospatial working memory (WM) in autism spectrum disorders. Autistic children and typically developing children were compared. We used WM tasks that measured phonological and visuospatial WM up to the capacity limit of each children. Overall measures of WM did not show differences between autistic children and…

In the present study, we explored how linguistic skills (phonological and semantic) influence the multiple components of school arithmetic (numeration, computation, and word problems) by analyzing them sequentially. We studied a sample of 262 schoolchildren, aged 8 to 11, nested in 27 classrooms, using the following measures: semantic skills,…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

The current meta-analysis synthesized findings from profiling research on Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). We reviewed a total of 81 studies published between 1964 and May 2015, representing a total of 9735 Chinese children. There are 982 effect sizes for the comparison between children with RD and age-matched typically developing…