We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex, age) on school achievement in several grades (kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade), in two large French cohorts, with more than 16,000 children. Running linear mixed-effects models, we find that, independently of socioeconomic status, having more siblings is…

False memories are well established episodic memory phenomena. Recent research in young adults has shown that semantically related associates can be falsely remembered as studied items in working memory (WM) tasks for lists of only a few items when a short 4-second interval was given between study and test. The present study reported two…

Background: The development of early literacy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. Four main domains of early literacy are currently observed: letter knowledge, vocabulary, phonological awareness and oral comprehension. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measures these domains in English language. However,…

The development of early numeracy skills in preschoolers is an important predictor of future academic performance. A multiplicity of tasks or tests measure early numeracy skills in the English-language. Nevertheless, no tools are currently in French for evaluating and monitoring the development of young children's early numeracy skills. The…

Previous studies of narrative development based on wordless picture stories indicate that before 7-8 years most children provide descriptive narratives with little inferential content such as explanations and attribution of mental states to the story characters. These components find greater expression in studies where children participated in…

Research Findings: In 2 experiments, we tested whether children generalize psychological and biological properties to novel foods. We used an induction task in which a property (either biological or psychological) was associated with a target food. Children were then asked whether a taxonomically related and a script-related food would also have…

The present study investigated the general cognitive determinants of alphabetic letter knowledge. It involved 60 French kindergarten children (mean age: five years six months). Two test batteries were used: the CMS to evaluate general cognitive abilities (memory, attention, and learning), and the LKT to assess letter knowledge and its various…

We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible 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…