Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

In this article, we compared French and Cameroonian schoolchildren's initial conceptions and comprehension of the night and day cycle in order to test for cultural influence. Forty students aged almost 8 years (Grade 2) were individually interviewed in their schools about night and day dynamics before they had received any teaching in astronomy.…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of explicit instruction, compared to constructivist instruction, in teaching subtraction in schools with a high concentration of students from a disadvantaged social background: eighty-seven second graders (mean age in months = 90.95, SD = 5.30). Two groups received explicit versus…

Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are few easy-to-use tools enabling teachers to assess reading ability. According to the Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough in "Reading and Writing", 2(2), 127-160, 1990), efficient…

Two longitudinal studies of word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension identified commonalities and differences in morphophonemic orthographies--French (Study 1, n = 1,313) or English (Study 2, n = 114) in early childhood (Grade 2)and middle childhood (Grade 5). For French and English, statistically significant concurrent relationships…

The present study used a variant of masked priming to track the development of 2 marker effects of orthographic and phonological processing from Grade 1 through Grade 5 in a cross-sectional study. Pseudohomophone (PsH) priming served as a marker for phonological processing, whereas transposed-letter (TL) priming was a marker for coarse-grained…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar)…

In light of the numerous studies on the detection of target letters among adults, it is generally accepted that the missing-letter effect depends both on a given word's frequency in its language and on its role (function vs. content) in a sentence. Following a presentation of several models explaining these observations we analyze the results of a…

This article deals with evaluating an interactive learning environment (ILE) during the iterative-design process. Various aspects of the system must be assessed and a number of evaluation methods are available. In designing the ILE Ambre-add, several techniques were combined to test and refine the system. In particular, we point out the merits of…