While symbolic number processing is an important correlate for typical and low mathematics achievement, it remains to be determined whether children with high mathematics achievement also have excellent symbolic number processing abilities. We investigated this question in 64 children (aged 8 to 10), i.e., 32 children with persistent high…

An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal…

Numerous studies have tried to identify the core deficit of developmental dyscalculia (DD), mainly by assessing a possible deficit of the mental representation of numerical magnitude. Research in healthy adults has shown that numerosity, duration, and space share a partly common system of magnitude processing and representation. However, in DD,…

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) is a widely used test of receptive vocabulary, but no researchers to date have examined the performance of low-educated, low-literate L2 adults, or compared these individuals' performances to their more highly educated peers. In this study, we used many-facet Rasch analysis and mixed-effects linear…

Many studies in the past decades have focused on low and typical mathematics achievers, yet little is known about children with high mathematics achievement, particularly at a young age. The current study aimed to fill this gap and started from the early work of Krutetskii (1976) as a theoretical lens to study the characteristics of high…

For students to be successful in higher education, they need not only have motivation and sufficient intellectual ability, but also a wide range of study skills as well as the metacognitive ability to determine when a change in strategy is needed. We examined whether first-year undergraduates with dyslexia (N = 100) differ from peers without…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Effective communication requires an understanding of the interlocutor's perspective. Being able to infer someone else's knowledge about a situation is a critical skill in any communication and social interaction. These abilities are part of Theory of Mind (ToM) skills and are known to be impaired in Down syndrome (DS). It therefore makes sense to…

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is associated with problems in empathy. Recent research suggests that impaired control over self-other overlap based on motor representations in individuals with autism spectrum disorder might underlie these difficulties. In order to investigate the relationship of self-other…

Languages differ in their preferences for particular intensifying constructions. While intensifying adjectival compounds (IACs) (e.g. "ijskoud, ice-cold") are productively used to express intensification in Dutch and English, in French this construction is hardly productive. Consequently, French-speaking learners may encounter…

Learning goal orientation is a prominent motivational construct that has been linked to positive student outcomes. For high-ability students, a lack of mastery learning goals has been theoretically and empirically associated with underachievement. However, longitudinal research examining the development and outcomes of their learning goal…

Studies comparing mathematical abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children are hitherto scarce, inconclusive, and mainly focusing on elementary school children or adolescents. The present study wants to gain insight into the foundation of mathematics by looking at preschool performances. Five early…

Background: Children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) are reported to have socio-communicative impairments. Although many of these children are diagnosed with intellectual disability (ID) and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these populations are seldom used as control groups. Hence, information regarding syndrome-specific…

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation…

During the past decade, both qualitative and quantitative research have documented strong feelings of fatalism amongst pupils enrolled in technical and vocational tracks in secondary education. Whereas those feelings have been shown to predict decreased school involvement and school misconduct, relatively little is known about their exact origins.…