This study investigated the extent to which language skills at ages 2 to 4 years could discriminate Hong Kong Chinese poor from adequate readers at age 7. Selected were 41 poor readers (age M = 87.6 months) and 41 adequate readers (age M = 88.3 months). The two groups were matched on age, parents' education levels, and nonverbal intelligence. The…

Empirical studies of high school mathematics typically report small gender differences in favor of boys. The present article challenges this established finding by comparing two competing structural conceptions of mathematical ability. The standard model assumes mathematical ability alone to account for the interindividual differences observed on…

General cognitive ability ("g") does not explain sex differences in academic test performance by the end of compulsory education. Instead, individual differences in specific reasoning abilities, after removing the effects of "g," may contribute to the observed gender gaps. Associations between general or specific cognitive…

This study examined the relationships among prosodic sensitivity, morphological awareness, and reading ability in a sample of 104 8- to 13-year-olds. Using a task adapted from Carlisle ("Applied Psycholinguistics," 9 (1988) 247-266), we measured children's ability to produce morphological derivations with differing levels of phonological…

This article reports results of a four-year longitudinal study that investigated the impact of specific and non-specific precursors on mathematical school achievement. Preschool quantity-number competencies (QNC) predicted mathematical achievement in primary school. Furthermore, basic arithmetic fact retrieval in Grade 1 had an impact on early…

The goal of the current study was to examine the contribution of three early social skills that may provide a foundation for cooperative performance in autism: (1) imitation, (2) joint attention, and (3) understanding of other people's intentions regarding actions on objects. Fourteen children with autistic disorder (AD) and 15 children with other…

Purpose: Achieving behavioral independence is a key task of adolescent development. This 1 article of a companion set of 2 (the 2nd addressing the topic of parental perspectives) presents an investigation of the impact of language ability on independence. Method: Longitudinal and follow-up data from 120 adolescents with a history of specific…

The goal of the current study was to explore the relations between shyness, academic engagement, and academic achievement in childhood. Participants were (n = 125) children (aged 9-13 years) attending public school boards in Canada. Children completed self reports of shyness and were administered a test of nonverbal IQ. Academic achievement was…

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal…

The Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales (RIAS) is a recently developed, individually administered psychometric instrument designed to measure general cognitive ability, as well as verbal (crystallized) intelligence, nonverbal (fluid) intelligence, and memory. Test reviewers have recommended the use of the RIAS despite the fact that, although…

Purpose: To evaluate the learning effects of a deductive language-teaching procedure when teaching a novel gender agreement verb inflection to children with language impairment. Method: Thirty-two 6-8-year-old children with language impairment were randomly assigned to either a deductive (N = 16) or an inductive (N = 16) treatment group. In the…

Purpose: This study examined whether late talkers identified at 24-31 months continued to have weaker language and reading skills at 17 years of age than typically developing peers. Method: Language and reading outcomes at 17 years of age were examined in 26 children identified as late talkers with normal nonverbal ability and normal receptive…

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 228 Norwegian children beginning some 12 months before formal reading instruction began. The relationships between a range of cognitive and linguistic skills (letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), short-term…

This research study focuses on integrating acting theories in pre-service English teacher education so as to improve nonverbal immediacy behavior and to contribute to the development process of teacher identity. Studies on incorporation of acting literature into teacher education provide educators with some significant findings clearly indicating…

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17-55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities…