This study was designed to investigate the relations between two metalinguistic abilities (phonological awareness and syntactic awareness) and two components of reading (recoding abilities and comprehension). In order to study these connections, a four‐year follow‐up study comprising 23 children was set up. These children had been tested repetitively during their first years of learning to read. Results were analysed with fixed‐order regression in which the dependent variable was either recoding abilities or comprehension performances; the first steps were extraneous variables (intelligence and vocabulary levels) and the final step was that of metalinguistic measures. Stepwise regressions were performed including all the measures (metalinguistic performances and extraneous variables). Results indicated that children's phonological awareness predicts later recoding abilities, while syntactic awareness predicts later reading comprehension after effects of extraneous variables have been ruled out.

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Children with specific language impairment (SLI) who show impaired phonological processing are at risk of developing reading disabilities, which raises the question of phonological impairment commonality between developmental dyslexia (DD) and SLI. In order to distinguish the failing phonological processes in SLI and DD, we investigated the different steps involved in speech processing going from perceptual discrimination through various aspects of phonological memory. Our results show that whereas the memory for sequence is likewise impaired in either disorder, children with SLI have to face additional impairment in phonological discrimination and short-term memory, which may account for even poorer phonological awareness than dyslexics'.

The second-language learning advantage was observed on dimensions distinguishing the two languages (i.e., compounds morphology and syntax) but not on shared affixes morphological and phonological dimensions. Thus, results are discussed in light of languages' characteristics and bilingualism proficiency.

There is developmental progression in the ability to recognize human faces (HF) during childhood, accompanied by qualitative differences in what children perceive and remember. The best known example is that of sensitivity to vertical orientation: while there is age-related improvement in recognizing upright faces, upside-down ones show no recognition improvement. It is believed by some investigators to be a sign of developing faceexpertise over the first 10 years or so of life. If expertise, based on experience with many individuals, is the basis for the development of the inversion-effect, faces from other species should not induce inversion-effects. In two experiments, we explored the expertise phenomenon by testing recognition of faces of different animal species with children between 5 and 10 years of age. Our results failed to show any developmental changes in the processing of faces of own-and other-species. Copyright