31 research outputs found
Dutch elementary school childrenâs attribution of meaning to written pseudowords
Grade two through six elementary school Dutch children were asked to perform a lexical decision task including 90 pseudowords constructed by changing one or two letters in a Dutch word. Subsequently, the children were asked about the meaning of pseudowords they had not crossed out and that they, apparently, had considered to be words. Multiple regression analyses on the lexical decision task showed that the older children were more hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword than by its orthographic neighbors. The younger children, in contrast, were less hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword and more hindered by its orthographic neighbors. Word length was a (small) predictor only for grade 6. Moreover, the answers of the children reflected that in their construction of meanings for the pseudowords they were hindered both by the morphemic structure and by the orthographic neighbors of the pseudowords
Ontogeny of Numerical Abilities in Fish
Background: It has been hypothesised that human adults, infants, and non-human primates share two non-verbal systems for enumerating objects, one for representing precisely small quantities (up to 3â4 items) and one for representing approximately larger quantities. Recent studies exploiting fishâs spontaneous tendency to join the larger group showed that their ability in numerical discrimination closely resembles that of primates but little is known as to whether these capacities are innate or acquired. Methodology/Principal Findings: We used the spontaneous tendency to join the larger shoal to study the limits of the quantity discrimination of newborn and juvenile guppies. One-day old fish chose the larger shoal when the choice was between numbers in the small quantity range, 2 vs. 3 fish, but not when they had to choose between large numbers, 4 vs. 8 or 4 vs. 12, although the numerical ratio was larger in the latter case. To investigate the relative role of maturation and experience in large number discrimination, fish were raised in pairs (with no numerical experience) or in large social groups and tested at three ages. Forty-day old guppies from both treatments were able to discriminate 4 vs. 8 fish while at 20 days this was only observed in fish grown in groups. Control experiments showed that these capacities were maintained after guppies were prevented from using non numerical perceptual variables that co-vary with numerosity. Conclusions/Significance: Overall, our results suggest the ability of guppies to discriminate small numbers is innate and i
Phonological representations of children with SLI : a study of French.
The present research examined the quality of the phonological representations of French
children with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with normal language development
(NLD). Twenty-five children with SLI and fifty normally developing children matched on lexical
age level participated in an auditory lexical decision task. The observations gathered in our study
can be summarized as follows. First, children with a higher receptive lexical level performed
better, and this was true both for children with NLD and children with SLI. Second, both children
with NLD and SLI were more likely to reject pseudo-words resulting from a modification affecting
the number of syllables of a word than pseudo-words resulting from a slight modification with the
number of syllables unchanged. This difference, however, was greater for the children with SLI
who appeared to have much difficulty rejecting pseudo-words resulting from slight modifications.
Finally, the performance of children with SLI was particularly poor when presented with pseudowords
resulting from a slight modification at the beginning or the end of a word. These findings
are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of an underspecification of phonological
representations in children with SLI