An ongoing debate in research on numerical cognition concerns the extent to which the approximate number system and symbolic number knowledge influence each other during development. The current study aims at establishing the direction of the developmental association between these two kinds of abilities at an early age. Fifty-seven children of 3–4 years performed two assessments at 7 months interval. In each assessment, children's precision in discriminating numerosities as well as their capacity to manipulate number words and Arabic digits was measured. By comparing relationships between pairs of measures across the two time points, we were able to assess the predictive direction of the link. Our data indicate that both cardinality proficiency and symbolic number knowledge predict later accuracy in numerosity comparison whereas the reverse links are not significant. The present findings are the first to provide longitudinal evidence that the early acquisition of symbolic numbers is an important precursor in the developmental refinement of the approximate number representation system.

a b s t r a c tThe present study assessed the relationships between approximate and exact number abilities in children with little formal instruction to ask (1) whether individual differences in acuity of the approximate system are related to basic abilities with symbolic numbers; and (2) whether the link between non-symbolic and symbolic number performance changes over the development. To address these questions, four different age groups of 3-to 6-year-old children were asked to compare pairs of train wagons varying on numerical ratio, as well as to complete exact tasks including number words or Arabic numbers. When correlation analyses were conducted across age groups, results indicated that performance in numerosity comparison was associated with mastery of symbolic numbers, even when short-term memory, IQ and age were controlled for. Separate analyses by age group revealed that the precision in numerosity discrimination was related to both number word and Arabic number knowledge but differently across the development.

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The evidence broadly supports the idea of a capacity for acquiring phonological skills in deaf children. Deaf children who are able to develop an implicitly structured phonological knowledge before learning to read will be better readers when this knowledge becomes explicit under the pressure of reading instruction.

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. b s t r a c tPhonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study 1); the influence of orthographic depth on the pace of phonological development during the transition to literacy (Study 2); and the impact of literacy instruction (Study 3). Results from 242 children did not reveal a consistent sequence of development as performance varied according to task demands and language. Phonics instruction appeared more influential than orthographic depth in the emergence of an early meta-phonological capacity to manipulate phonemes, and preliminary indications were that cross-linguistic variation was associated with speech rhythm more than factors such as syllable complexity. The implications of the outcome for current models of phonological development are discussed.

Hearing and deaf children, ranging in age from 6 years 8 months to 14 years 4 months, and matched for general spelling level, were required to spell high-frequency and low-frequency words. Of interest was performance in relation to degree of exposure to Cued Speech (CS), which is a system delivering phonetically augmented speechreading through the visual modality. Groups were (a) hearing children, (b) deaf children exposed early and intensively to CS at home (CS-Home), and (c) deaf children exposed to CS later and at school only (CS-School). Most of the spelling productions of hearing children as well as of CS-Home children were phonologically accurate for high-frequency as well as for low-frequency words. CS-School children, who had less specified phonological representations, made a lower proportion of phonologically accurate spellings. These findings indicate that the accuracy of phonological representations, independent of the modality (acoustic versus visual) through which spoken language is perceived, determines the acquisition of phonology-to-orthography mappings. Analyses of the spelling productions indicate that the acquisition of orthographic representations of high precision depends on fully specified phonological representations.

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