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This study investigates the understanding of intentions in 100 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID; mean IQ 36) between 2 and 10 years of age. A within-subject design with two conditions was used. In the target condition, the experimenter successfully performed the task; while in the unfulfilled attempt condition, the experimenter attempted but did not successfully completed the task. Children with ASD and ID completed the tasks significantly more frequent and showed less off-task behavior in the target condition than in the unsuccessful attempt condition, which might indicate that children with ASD and ID experience difficulty in understanding the intentions of others. Successful completion of the task after an unsuccessful attempt is predicted by the ability to imitate and behavioral inflexibility and is associated with better performance on receptive and expressive language tests. The latter results are in line with several other studies suggesting a relation between the understanding of intentions and early social communication and language.

The effects of a word identification game aimed at enhancing decoding efficiency in poor readers were tested. Following a pretest–posttest–retention design with a waiting control group, 62 poor‐reading Dutch second graders received a five‐hour tablet intervention across a period of five weeks. During the intervention, participants practiced reading words and pseudowords while doing semantic categorization and lexical decision exercises in a gaming context. Prior to, directly after, and five weeks following the intervention, word‐decoding efficiency was assessed using a standardized read‐aloud test consisting of six lists of untrained words and pseudowords with three levels of difficulty: consonant‐vowel‐consonant items, consonant cluster items, and disyllabic items. Significant increases as a result of the brief gaming intervention were found for decoding efficiency on all six word lists. The game, which included repetition, immediate corrective feedback, and a semantics task, elicited transfer and retention effects. 本研究旨在测试一个辨识单字游戏的效能,该游戏目的在于提高阅读能力差的学生的解码效率。研究采用「前测‐后测‐保留测」的设计而进行,并使用一个等待对照组。研究参与者是62名阅读能力差的荷兰小学二年级学生,他们在五星期内接受五个小时的平板电脑游戏干预。在干预期间,参与者练习读单字和假字,同时也做一些在游戏环境中的语义分类和词汇判断练习。在干预之前,紧接完成干预之后和完成干预后的第五星期,参与者均接受单字解码效率评估,评估方法是使用一个标准化朗读测验,该测验包含六个未受过训练的单字和假字的列表,代表着三个难度阶级的试题︰辅音‐元音‐辅音、辅音群、双音节词。这个简短游戏式的干预结果显示,参与者对所有六个列表的单字解码效率均有显著的上升。这个包含了重复、立即纠正反馈和语义任务的游戏,能产生转移和保留的效应。 Se probaron los efectos de un juego de identificación de palabras cuyo propósito era mejorar la eficacia de descifrar de lectores pobres. Después de dar pruebas previas, posteriores y de retención a un grupo de control, 62 estudiantes de segundo grado que eran lectores pobres recibieron una intervención de cinco horas durante un período de cinco semanas. Durante la intervención, los participantes practicaban leer palabras y pseudopalabras a medida que hacían clasificaciones semánticas y ejercicios de decisiones lexicales en un contexto de juego. La eficacia del desciframiento de palabras fue evaluada antes de, inmediatamente después, y a las cinco semanas después de la intervención usando una prueba estandarizada de lectura en voz alta que consistía de seis listas de palabras no estudiadas y pseudopalabras de tres niveles de dificultad: artículos de consonante‐vocal‐consonante, artículos de grupos consonánticos, y artículos bisilábicos. Se encontraron mejorías importantes como resultado de la breve intervención de juego en la eficacia del desciframiento en todas las seis listas. El juego, que incluía repetición, la generación inmediata de correcciones, y una tarea semántica provocó efectos de transferencia y retención. تم اختبار تأثير لعبة تحديد الكلمة التي هدفها تعزيز كفاءة فك الكلمة للقراء الضعفاء. تم إتباع تصميم الاختبار القبلي‐البعدي‐و قدرة الاحتفاظ مع مجموعة ضبط معدلة، تلقى 62 طالبا هولنديا ضعفاء القراءة من الصف الثاني خمس ساعات من المساعدة باستخدام اللوحات الإلكترونية عبر خمسة أسابيع. أثناء التدخل [intervention]، يتدرب المشاركين على قراءة الكلمات وشبه الكلمات وفي نفس الوقت على تصنيف الدلالات اللفاظية وتمارين الإختيرات المعجمية في سياق الألعاب. جرى تقييم كفاءة فك الكلمة بإستخدام اختبار موحد للقراءة بصوت عال مباشرة قبل، بعد، وخمسة أسابيع بعد التدخل بإستخدام ستة قوائم من الكلمات وشبه الكلمات غير المُدَّرب عليها مع ثلاثة مستويات من الصعوبة: كلمات تركيبها حرف ساكن‐حرف علة ‐حرف ساكن، كلمات من حروف ساكنة، ولكلمات ذات المقطعين. تم قياس زيادات كبيرة نتيجة لتدخل وجيز لكفاءة فك الكلمات بالألعاب لجميع قوائم الكلمات الستة. اللعبة، التي تضمنت التكرار، وردود الفعل التصحيحية الفورية، ومهمة دلالة اللفظ، أثَّرت على قدرة الطلاب على التعلم والاحتفاظ. Была проверена эффективность игры “опознай слово” для поддержки учащихся, испытывающих трудности в чтении. Исследование на сохранение в памяти внешнего облика слова проводилось в формате пре‐ и пост‐тестирования при наличии контрольной группы. Экспериментальная группа – 62 слабо читающих голландских второклассника – в течение пяти недель получала дозированное вмешательство общей продолжительностью пять часов. В это время они практиковали чтение слов и псевдослов, занимались их семантической классификацией и выполняли лексические упражнения в игровой форме. Непосредственно перед, сразу после и еще спустя пять недель после вмешательства умение декодировать слова оценивалась посредством стандартного теста на чтение вслух шести списков ранее не отрабатывавшихся слов и псевдослов трех уровней сложности, содержавших сочетания согласная‐гласная‐согласная, кластер согласных и двусложные слова. В результате краткого игрового вмешательства произошло существенное повышение качества декодирования по всем шести спискам. Игра, которая включает в себя повторение, мгновенную корректирующую обратную связь и задачи на семантику, способствует запоминанию облика слов и переносу умения читать буквосочетания с одних слов на другие. Nous avons testé les effets d'un jeu d'identification de mots destiné à développer l'efficacité du décodage chez des mauvais lecteurs. Suivant un plan pré‐test / post test avec un groupe contrôle en attente, 62 mauvais lecteurs danois de deuxième année ont reçu une intervention sur tablette pendant cinq semaines. Pendant l'intervention, les participants effectuaient une lecture de mots et de pseudo mots tout en faisant des exercices de catégorisation sémantique et de décision lexicale dans un contexte ludique. Avant l'intervention, juste après, et cinq semaines plus tard, nous avons évalué l'efficacité dans le décodage de mots à l'aide d'un test standardisé de lecture à haute voix composé de six listes de mots et de pseudo mots non utilisés pendant l'entraînement et comportant trois niveaux de difficultés : des items consonne‐voyelle‐consonne, des items avec un cluster consonantique, et des items disyllabiques. Nous avons observé une augmentation significative de l'efficacité du décodage pour les six listes de mots suite à cette rapide intervention ludique. Ce jeu, qui comportait répétition, feed back correcteur immédiat, et tâche sémantique, a produit des effets transfert et de mémorisation.

In most industrialized societies, the regular educational system does not meet the educational needs of gifted pupils, causing a lag in their school achievement. One way in which more challenge can be provided to gifted children is with an enrichment program. In the present study, cognitive, socioemotional, and attitudinal effects of a triarchic enrichment program were examined in a pretest–posttest control group design. Participants were 66 upper elementary school students. With positive effects on practical intelligence, motivation, self-concept, and enjoyment of science being found, the results of this study indicated that the pull-out program is a valuable experience in the cognitive and socioemotional development of gifted children.

This study examined the peer relationships and social behaviors of deaf adolescents in the first 2 years of secondary school. Peer nominations and ratings of peer status and behavior were collected longitudinally with 74 deaf and 271 hearing adolescents from Grade 7 to Grade 8. The predictions of deaf adolescents’ peer status in Grade 8 from Grade 7 behaviors differed between mainstream education and special education settings. The behaviors of deaf early adolescents in the beginning of secondary school strongly predicted their peer status a year later. For deaf mainstream students, withdrawn behavior was the most important and negative predictor of peer status. For deaf students in special education settings, prosocial behavior was the most important and positive predictor of peer status.

During language acquisition in the first year of life, children become sensitive to phonotactic probabilities such as the likelihood of speech sound occurrences in the ambient language. Because this sensitivity is acquired at an early age, the extent to which the neural system that underlies speech processing in adults is tuned to these phonological regularities can reflect difficulties in processing language-specific phonological regularities that can persist into adulthood. Here, we examined the neural processing of phonotactic probabilities in 18 adults with dyslexia and 18 non-dyslexic controls using mismatch negativity, a pre-attentive neurophysiological response. Stimuli that differed in phonotactic probability elicited similar mismatch negativity responses among the adults with dyslexia, whereas the controls responded more strongly to stimuli with a high phonotactic probability than to stimuli with a low phonotactic probability, suggesting that controls – but not adults with dyslexia – are sensitive to the phonological regularities of the ambient language. These findings suggest that the underlying neural system in adults with dyslexia is not properly tuned to language-specific phonological regularities, which may partially account for the phonological deficits that are often reported in dyslexic individuals.

This study of 48 children with congenital blindness who attended mainstream schools focused on the tactile and haptic skills they needed in typical academic and everyday tasks. The results showed that, in general, the children mastered such tactile tasks, but some items posed special problems.

Teacher expectations are important for the literacy development of children. The goal of this study was to investigate to what extent teacher expectations for future literacy success at the end of elementary school differed for children with cerebral palsy (CP) as compared with peers without disabilities in kindergarten. In addition, we investigated to what extent teacher literacy expectations of children with CP were related to additional impairments such as speech, intellectual and physical impairments, and to the current level of emergent literacy skills. Forty-nine teachers of children with CP and 71 teachers of non-disabled children responded to the questionnaire. The results showed that teacher expectations for future reading and writing success of children with CP were lower (all Pvalues are <0.001) but also of a different nature, as eight teachers had no idea what to expect for the future reading development, and 12 teachers did not know what to expect for the future writing development of the child with CP. Multiple regression analysis showed that teacher reading expectations could best be predicted by both intelligence and emergent literacy skills (P<0.001), whereas teacher writing skills could best be predicted by intelligence (P<0.001).

In a survey study, we investigated teacher attitudes toward acceleration and accelerated students in the Netherlands. Teachers (N= 334) from 31 secondary schools gave their opinion about gifted education and acceleration, and evaluated statements about accelerated students. Most teachers considered a special approach for gifted students advisable and acceleration a useful intervention. Teachers' opinions about accelerated students' social competence, school motivation and achievement, emotional problems, and isolation were qualified by the quantity and quality of prior experience with accelerated students and by their opinion on acceleration in gifted education. In a subsequent intervention study, we examined whether specific information on acceleration and giftedness changes teachers' attitudes toward accelerated students. Teachers who attended the information meeting and received written information expressed more positive opinions about accelerated students' social competence and school achievement and motivation and less negative opinions about emotional problems after intervention. Implications for gifted child education are discussed.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the development of and interrelations between the language proficiencies and reading abilities of children learning to read in either a first language or a second language. The authors compared the reading‐comprehension, word‐decoding, and oral‐language skills of both high and low SES Dutch third and fourth graders to the skills of low SES minority third and fourth graders from a Turkish or Moroccan background living in the Netherlands. Several tests of reading comprehension, word decoding, oral text comprehension, morphosyntactic knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge were administered at the beginning of third grade, the end of third grade, and the end of fourth grade. The results showed the minority children to be faster decoders than the Dutch low SES children. With respect to reading comprehension and oral language proficiency, however, the minority children were found to lag behind the Dutch children in all respects. With respect to the interrelations between oral‐language skills and reading skills, the development of reading comprehension was found to be influenced more by top‐down comprehension‐based processes than by bottom‐up word‐decoding processes for both the first‐ and second‐language learners. The oral Dutch skills of the minority children played a more prominent role in the explanation of their reading‐comprehension skills than the oral‐language skills of the Dutch children, however.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations between communicative competence and five dimensions of personality in 241 first and second language–learning children in The Netherlands. To determine the underlying communicative competence of the first and second language learners of Dutch, a broad array of linguistic measures and teacher judgments were collected. Observational scales referring to the Big Five personality factors were used to characterize the children's personalities. The results showed that three basic components underlie both the monolingual and bilingual children's communicative competence: organizational competence, involving lexical, syntactic, discourse, and functional abilities; pragmatic competence, involving sociocultural routines and illocutionary force; and strategic competence, involving the planning and monitoring of communicative behavior. The relations between the different dimensions of personality and the components of communicative competence revealed the following patterns to characterize first language learners: conscientiousness and emotional stability correlated with basic organizational skills; openness to experience correlated with pragmatic competence; and a broad range of personality characteristics with the acquisition of communicative strategies. In contrast, primarily openness to experience and, to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and extraversion were found to be related to the buildup of basic organizational skills, the acquisition of pragmatic skills, and the development of monitoring strategies in second language learners.

The purpose of this study was to describe the first and second language literacy levels of a sample of 222 Turkish children living in the Netherlands and to identify the factors that are related to individual variation in their literacy performance. Measures of both school literacy and functional literacy were taken in the target languages, Turkish and Dutch. Data of monolingual control groups were used as benchmarks. To explore individual variation in biliteracy scores, background characteristics originating from the child, the family, and the school were examined. The results of the study indicated that the children in the Netherlands attained lower levels of literacy than their monolingual peers. The level of biliteracy of the children in the Netherlands turned out to be primarily related to the factors of home stimulation, parents' motivation for schooling, and children's self-esteem.

The present study investigates the monitoring behaviour of Turkish children speaking Dutch as a second language. Spontaneous speech data were collected over a period of two years at one-year intervals with 74 children from the time they entered Dutch primary schools. In order to discover developmental changes, a typology of monitoring behaviour was given as a function of the children's age. A distinction was made between corrections, restarts and repeats. With regard to corrections, phonological, syntactic and semantic types were distinguished. In order to explain the individual variation in monitoring, the occurrence of monitoring types was correlated with nonverbal cognitive skill and with oral second language proficiency. The structure of monitoring processes was investigated by determining the point in the utterance at which children go back to make a new start for correction, after they have detected an error. The results show that during the process of second language acquisition different types of repairs can be distinguished, some of which increase with age and some of which decrease. A positive relationship was found between monitoring use and the child's cognitive skill and second language proficiency. With regard to the structure of monitoring, it was found that phonological errors tend to be detected faster than syntactic and semantic errors. The results are dicussed in the light of research on first language monitoring use.

This article goes into both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of literacy education to immigrant children. From a sociolinguistic point of view attention is given to the literacy needs of ethnic minority groups in a multilingual community, the language policies that authorities can follow with regard to literacy and the monolingual and bilingual literacy instruction models that these policies can give rise to. From a psycholinguistic point of view aspects of immigrant children's processes of learning to read are highlighted, and arguments for bilingual literacy instruction are summed up. In addition, a perspective of literacy education to immigrant children is given.

The purpose of the present study was to identify factors that predict the first‐and second‐language proficiency of ethnic minority children at the age of 6 years. A sample of 72 six‐year‐old Turkish children, living in The Netherlands since their infant years, was identified prior to their entrance into the first grade of primary school. Predictor measures originating from the child, his or her family, and the institutional care the child had gone through were collected, along with direct and indirect first‐ and second‐language proficiency measures. The results of the study make clear that two dimensions underlie the children's proficiency in either language: communicative skills versus cognitive/academic skills. Measures of the cultural orientation of the children and their parents turned out to be related to all of the proficiency levels under consideration. The extent of caretaker interaction in the first language was al so positively related to the children's bilingual proficiency level. Moreover, there was evidence for the notion of interdependency in bilingual development in that cognitive/academic abilities in the second language could be predicted from similar abilities in the first language.

Data on Dutch‐Turkish language‐mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analysed. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the descriptive models developed in research on language‐mixing are generalizable. It was found that the functional characteristics of the children's language‐mixing are compatible with earlier results. Structural analysis of the data, however, yielded results that shed considerable doubt on the universal applicability of surface structure constraint rules for sentence‐internal language‐mixing.