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…

There is increasing interest in attachment-related social information processing, including children's attentional processing of information regarding the attachment figure. Previous research in middle childhood revealed evidence for a stronger attentional focus toward mother in children with less secure attachment expectations. However, the…

Sensitivity to spacing information within faces improves with age and reaches maturity only at adolescence. In this study, we tested 6-16-year-old children's sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are embedded in…

In an experimental design, we examined the effects of middle-term training in social information processing (SIP) and in Theory of Mind (ToM) on preschoolers' social cognition and social adjustment. 48 preschoolers took part in a pre-test and post-test session involving cognitive, socio-cognitive and social adjustment (direct and indirect)…

In order to better understand the nature of verbal short-term memory (STM) deficits in dyslexic children, the present study used the distinction between item and serial order retention capacities in STM tasks. According to recent STM models, storage of verbal item information depends very directly upon the richness of underlying phonological and…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…

It has been suggested that individuals with dyslexia show poorer performance on those aspects of arithmetic that involve the manipulation of verbal representations, such as the use of fact retrieval strategies. The present study examined this in 13 children with dyslexia who showed normal general mathematics achievement and 16 matched controls.…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a deficit in number processing and arithmetic that affects 3-6% of schoolchildren. The goal of the present study was to analyze cerebral bases of DD related to symbolic number processing. Children with DD aged 9-11 years and matched children with no learning disability history were investigated using fMRI. The two…

To increase our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in internal working models of attachment, this study investigated the relationship between secure attachment and attentional breadth to mother using a dual task design. The content of the cues (mother vs. unfamiliar women) and the duration of the presentation of the cues (34 msec,…

Two experiments examined the process of acquisition of sentence structure in the passive voice among young children. The subjects were several hundred monolingual French-speaking children aged 4-11 in schools in Liege, Belgium. The two experiments used different subject groups. In the first experiment, the children were required to interpret…