Cognitive Overload and Orthographic Errors: When Cognitive Overload Enhances Subject–Verb Agreement Errors. A Study in French Written Language

Three experiments were carried out to test the hypothesis that cognitive overload enhances the occurrence of subject-verb agreement errors in French. Highly educated adults were presented orally with sentences they were required to write down. The sentences were of the types “N1 de N2 V” (Noun 1 of Noun 2 Verb: Le chien des voisins arrive/The neighbours’ dog is arriving) versus “Prl Pr2 V” (Pronoun 1 Pronoun 2 Verb: Il les aime/He likes them). In these sentences, N1 (Pr1) and N2 (Pr2) matched or mismatched in number. In the three experiments, the sentences had to be recalled either in an isolated condition (i.e. every presented sentence had to be immediately recalled) or with a concurrent …

Predicting arithmetical achievement from neuro-psychological performance: a longitudinal study

In this article, we show that the performances of 5- to 6-year-old children in arithmetic tests can be predicted from their performances in neuro-psychological tests administered a number of months in advance, independently of their level of development.

From sentence production to text production: Investigating fundamental processes

The purpose of the present article is to present a nom exhaustive review about the cognitive psychology research in english and in french language, dealing with the study of the organization and the functioning of the oral and written language production mechanisms.

Quality control in the optical industry: From a work analysis of lens inspection to a training programme, an experimental case study

A cognitive work analysis of quality inspection in the optical industry has been carried out in order to devise a training programme. The task concerned the inspection of high quality human eyeglass lenses. We conducted an experimental investigation of defect detection and acceptability decision-making tasks in 18 experts and novice inspectors. Detection and decision-making were investigated together and separately in two experimental sessions. We showed the effect of expertise on reaction times and errors, and we described the cognitive processes of novice inspectors. On the basis of the processing differences between the two groups, a training programme for new inspectors was devised and …

From algorithmic computing to direct retrieval: Evidence from number and alphabetic arithmetic in children and adults

A number of theories of mental arithmetic suggest that the ability to solve simple addition and subtraction problems develops from an algorithmic strategy toward a strategy based on the direct retrieval of the result from memory. In the experiment presented here, 2nd and 12th graders were asked to solve two tasks of number and alphabet arithmetic. The subjects transformed series of 1 to 4 numbers or letters (item span) by adding or subtracting an operand varying from 1 to 4 (operation span). Although both the item and operation span were associated with major and identical effects in the case of both numbers and letters at 2nd grade, such effects were clearly observable only in the case of …

Arithmetic Problems Formulation and Working Memory Load

First, third, and fifth graders (French children in American-numbered grades) were asked to solve arithmetic problems in which an initial state was modified by two successive transformations. Three independent variables were manipulated systematically. First, the unknown state was either the final state (Sl) or the initial state (S2). Second, either the known state (01) or the transformations (02) appeared in the first place in the problem wording. Third, the question was either located at the end (Ql) or at the beginning (42) of the problem text. As anticipated, these modifications strongly affected the performances at every age: S1 appears clearly easier than S2; 0 1 leads to a better per…

Algorithmic Solution of Arithmetic Problems and Operands-Answer Associations in Long-Term Memory

Many developmental models of arithmetic problem solving assume that any algorithmic solution of a given problem results in an association of the two operands and the answer in memory (Logan & Klapp, 1991; Siegler, 1996). In this experiment, adults had to perform either an operation or a comparison on the same pairs of two-digit numbers and then a recognition task. It is shown that unlike comparisons, the algorithmic solution of operations impairs the recognition of operands in adults. Thus, the postulate of a necessary and automatic storage of operands-answer associations in memory when young children solve additions by algorithmic strategies needs to be qualified.

Do Phonological Codes Constrain the Selection of Orthographic Codes in Written Picture Naming?

Sound-to-print consistency of picture labels was manipulated in five experiments to investigate whether phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes in written picture naming. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants wrote down picture names which were inconsistent or consistent in the phono-orthographic mapping defined either at the level of the word unit, i.e., heterographic homophones versus nonhomophones (Experiment 1), or at the sublexical level (Experiment 2). In neither experiment did phonographic consistency affect written latencies. Although more errors were observed for inconsistent than for consistent picture names, the observation of a similar error pattern in an…

Number transcoding in children: A functional analysis

French-speaking second-grade children from France and Wallonia were asked to write down in the Arabic code, numbers orally presented at six successive one-month-spaced sessions. The evolution of the children's production (patterns of correct responses and errors) is analysed and tentatively interpreted through the model of number and calculation processing developed by McCloskey in adult neuropsychology. In order to evaluate their number production and comprehension mechanisms the children were furthermore submitted to other number processing tasks. It is tentatively concluded that the children's difficulties in the Arabic written task were localized at the level of the production of the Ar…

Does the Coordination of Verbal and Motor Information Explain the Development of Counting in Children?

Counting is often considered to be the coordination of two actions: saying the number-words and pointing to each object. We report three experiments to test the hypothesis that this coordination requires the use of the central executive (A. D. Baddeley, 1990), and that the cost of coordination decreases with age. Participants were 5- and 9-year-old children and adults. At all ages tested, the manipulation of the difficulty of each component affected counting performance but did not make coordination more difficult. These results suggest that, at least from the age 5, counting is a procedure in which the control of coordination is not attention demanding.

Masked form priming in writing words from pictures: evidence for direct retrieval of orthographic codes.

Three experiments used the masked priming paradigm to investigate the role of orthographic and phonological information in written picture naming. In all the experiments, participants had to write the names of pictures as quickly as possible under three different priming conditions. Nonword primes could be: (1) phonologically and orthographically related to the picture name; (2) orthographically related as in (1) but phonologically related to a lesser degree than in (1); (3) orthographically and phonologically unrelated except for the first consonant (or consonant cluster). Orthographic priming effects were observed with a prime exposure duration of 34 ms (Experiments 1 and 2) and of 51 ms …

Consistency and word-frequency effects on spelling among first- to fifth-grade French children : A regression-based study.

We describe a large-scale regression study that examines the influence of lexical (word frequency, lexical neighborhood) and sublexical (feedforward and feedback consistency) variables on spelling accuracy among first, second, and third- to fifth-graders. The wordset analyzed contained 3430 French words. Predictors in the stepwise regression analyses were grade-level-based and compiled from child-directed written materials. In all grades, feedforward consistency and word frequency had independent effects. However, whereas the feedforward-consistency contribution remained high and did not vary across grades, the impact of word frequency exhibited a massive jump between first and second grade…

Children's Implicit Learning of Graphotactic and Morphological Regularities

In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old children and adults were influenced by both types of constraints. The influence of graphotactic regularities persisted when reliance on morphological rules was possible, without any falling off as a function of age. This suggests that rules are not abstracted, even after massive amounts of exposure to a rule-based material. These re…

The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective

This experiment examines how narrative context affects French subjects' selection of past imperfective (imparfait) vs. perfective inflections with different predicate types. Adults and 10-year-old children were asked to inflect verbs presented in their written infinitive form in two conditions: (a) in isolated sentences; (b) embedded in the beginning, middle, or end of narratives. Regardless of conditions, the adults rarely used theimparfait with punctual resultative predicates. In both conditions, the frequency ofimparfait was high with durative predicates, particularly with aresultative ones, but it varied with position in the narratives, being highest at the beginning and lowest at the e…

L'apprentissage/enseignement de la morphologie écrite du nombre en français

In written French forms play an essential role. Numerous morphological marks have no correspondence in oral French. This is the case of plural flexions : -s for the plural of nouns and adjectives and -nt for verbs at the third person of indicative present. Earlier research showed that on the one hand the interpretation of these marks precedes their production and that this nominal flexion proceeding appears earlier and more correctly than adjectival flexion proceeding and verbal flexion (-nt). On the other hand, overgeneralizations were tracked down thanks to this research work : faultly use of flexions especially nominal flexions attributed to verbs (ils timbres). But in these investigatio…

L'influence de la consistance des relations phono graphiques et grapho-phonologiques dans la production orthographique chez l'enfant du CP au CM2 : une étude en régressions multiples avec des normes distributionnelles par niveau scolaire

Selecting between Competitors in Multiplication Tasks: An Explanation of the Errors Produced by Adolescents with Learning Difficulties

Two experiments were conducted in order to determine the nature of the difficulties encountered by learning disabled (LD) adolescents in the resolution of multiplication problems ( a b, where a and b vary between 2 and 9). A response production task (Experiment 1) revealed that the incorrect responses generally belonged to the table of one of the two operands, and that the order of difficulty of the problems was the same for the LDs as for normal children, adolescents, and educated adults as reported in the literature. This result suggests that the difficulties are not solely due to memory problems. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that these difficulties were caused by a problem in inhi…

Etude en temps réel de la production eEcrite chez des enfants de sept et huit ans

Cette recherche a pour but d’etudier la production ecrite en temps reel chez l’enfant de 7 et 8 ans (CE1 et CE2). On a demande a 12 enfants de 7 ans et a 12 de 8 ans de rediger deux textes-un recit et un compterendu- et on les a filmes en train d’ecrire. On a ensuite etudie les caracteristiques temporelles de leurs compositions: debits, pauses… Nous observons trois phenomenes importants:

Why does placing the question before an arithmetic word problem improve performance. A situation model account.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the controversial issue of the nature of the representation constructed by individuals to solve arithmetic word problems. More precisely, we consider the relevance of two different theories: the situation or mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Reusser, 1989) and the schema theory (Kintsch & Greeno, 1985; Riley, Greeno, & Heller, 1983). Fourth-graders who differed in their mathematical skills were presented with problems that varied in difficulty and with the question either before or after the text. We obtained the classic effect of the position of the question, with better performance when the question was presented prior to the text. …

Ponctuation et Connecteurs: Une Approche Textuelle et Génétique

Deux experiences on ete conduites en vue d’etudier le fonctionnement textuel de la ponctuation et de certains connecteurs, et son developpement. Des sujets de 7, 9, 11 et 13 ans ont eu a recopier en les ponctuant quatre recits construits selon la «grammaire narrative» de Mandler et Johnson (1977) et presentes sans ponctuation. Les resultats montrent que le taux de ponctuation varie en fonction du site: fort en debut et fin de texte, il diminue tres significativement au milieu. D’autre part, l’insertion de et entraine une forte chute de ponctuation.Alors etapres restent, eux, le plus souvent ponctues maisalors s’associe surtout a des virgules. Ces tendances ne sont significatives qu’a partir…

Is Written Language Production more Difficult than Oral Language Production? A Working Memory Approach

Abstract Is written language production more difficult than oral language production? Probably, yes. But why? Several experiments were conducted in order to test the impact of low-level activities involved in writing on the performance of higher-level activities also involved in writing. Three assumptions were made: (1) the capacity of working-memory is limited, (2) every component of writing has a cognitive load, and (3) every increase in the load devoted to the activity of one component would lead to a decrease in the remaining resources available for the other components. These low-level activities are more resource-consuming in children than in adults because children have not yet autom…

An Experimental Study of Lexical Access in the Writing and Naming of Isolated Words

Unlike speech production, lexical access in written production has not systematically been investigated experimentally. Four experiments were run on literate adults to support the view that although the spoken and written language production systems may obviously share some processing levels, they also both have some specific processing components. The general findings provide evidence for such a view and are discussed in the framework of studies in verbal production conducted on normals and on braindamaged patients. Contrairement a la production verbale orale, l'acces lexical en production verbale ecrite n'a pas ete etudie experimentalement de facon systematique. Quatre experiences ont ete…

Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach

Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensio…