It is widely accepted that finger and number representations are associated: many correlations (including longitudinal ones) between finger gnosis/counting and numerical/arithmetical abilities have been reported. However, such correlations do not necessarily imply causal influence of early finger-number training; even in longitudinal designs, mediating variables may be underlying such correlations. Therefore, we investigated whether there may be a causal relation by means of an extensive experimental intervention in which the impact of finger-number training on initial arithmetic skills was tested in kindergarteners to see whether they benefit from the intervention even before they start formal schooling. The experimental group received 50 training sessions altogether for 10 weeks on a daily basis. A control group received phonology training of a similar duration and intensity. All children improved in the arithmetic tasks. To our surprise and contrary to most accounts in the literature, the improvement shown by the experimental training group was not superior to that of the active control group. We discuss conceptual and methodological reasons why the finger-number training employed in this study did not increase the initial arithmetic skills beyond the unspecific effects of the control intervention.

Phonemic awareness and rudimentary grapheme knowledge concurrently develop in pre-school age. In a training study, we tried to disentangle the role of both precursor functions of reading for spoken word recognition. Two groups of children exercised with phonemic materials, but only one of both groups learnt corresponding letters to trained phonemes. A control group exercised finger-number associations (non-linguistic training). After the training, we tested how sensitive children were to prime-target variation in word onset priming. A group of young adults took part in the same experiment to provide data from experienced readers. While decision latencies to the targets suggested fine-grained spoken word processing in all groups, event-related potentials (ERPs) indicated that both phonemic training groups processed phonemic variation in more detail than the non-linguistic training group and young adults at early stages of speech processing. Our results indicate temporal plasticity of implicit speech processing in pre-school age as a function of explicit phonemic training.

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