Chapter 10

Question 1

symbolic systems

Answer 1

are human cultural inventions for representing information, systems that are detached from the information itself. A variety of different symbolic systems have been invented like orthographic systems (alphabet, Chinese and Sanskrit characters) and the number system (Arabic numerals).

Question 2

difference in psycholinguistic ‘grain size’

Answer 2

Languages differ by the units of sound that are represented by print.

Question 3

The development of phonological awareness seems to follow a similar developmental sequence across languages

Answer 3

First children gain awareness of syllables, then of onset-rime units, and finally phonemes.

Question 4

metalinguistic awareness

Answer 4

Infants can distinguish different phonemes, but the ability to reflect on one’s knowledge of the sound structure of words develops gradually, particularly at the phonemic level. Phonological awareness is therefore also called metalinguistic awareness, highlighting that the child needs to reflect on and become consciously aware of knowledge that is already present in the mental lexicon

Question 5

Syllabic awareness

Answer 5

is the ability to recognize the number of syllables in words. Six correct responses in a row during a study.
However, the key finding is that at the syllable level, children as young as three years perform at above-chance levels in all of these tasks. Similar results are found in other languages.

Question 6

Orthographic transparency

Answer 6

is the consistency of symbol to sound (e.g. grapheme-phoneme)

Question 7

grain sizes

Answer 7

(syllable, onset-rime, phoneme)

Question 8

The availability problem

Answer 8

reflects the fact that not all phonological units are accessible prior to reading.

Question 9

The consistency problem

Answer 9

refers to the fact that the alphabet represents phonemes with more transparency in some languages than in others.

Question 10

The granularity problem

Answer 10

refers to the fact that there are many more orthographic units to learn when access to the phonological system is based on bigger grain sizes as opposed to smaller grain sizes.

Question 11

There are various cognitive ‘hallmarks’ suggesting a reliance on grapheme-phoneme recording

Answer 11

● Length effect: children who are applying grapheme-phoneme correspondences should take longer to read words with more letters/phonemes.
● Non-word reading: children applying grapheme-phoneme correspondences should be as efficient at reading letter strings that do not correspond to real words as they at reading letter strings that do correspond real words.

Question 12

Three types of behavioural tasks reveal phonological difficulties across languages

Answer 12

These are:
● Phonological awareness tasks: e.g. the tapping task, the oddity task. ● Phonological short-term memory tasks: e.g. digit span task. ● ‘rapid automized naming’ or RAN tasks: tasks requiring children to name familiar items like colours, pictures, or digits as fast as they can.

Question 13

Cognitive neuroimaging research by Dehaene and his colleagues suggested that there are three coding systems for numbers in different areas of the brain:

Answer 13

1) A visually based code for Arabic numbers, located in the fusiform gyrus.
2) A linguistic system for storing number facts. For example, the multiplication tables, which are practised so often that they are stored linguistically. This happens, for example, in the same way as how the days of the week are stored. This is found in the left lateral language areas, such as the left angular gyrus.
3) A general number of senses, located in the parietal lobes.

Question 14

‘analog magnitude representation

Answer 14

This is an internal mental representation of continuous quantities. This indicates that the brain uses a kind of internal continuum (e.g. a number line) when comparisons between continuous amounts are made. This continuum is an analog of the external stimulus. In the case of numbers, there is an analog representation of numbers. These are not mentally discrete entities that indicate exact quantities, but they indicate estimates of quantities. The greater the quantities, the less precise the representations for these numbers. Zoals het zien van een lineaal.

Question 15

Weber’s law,

Answer 15

This law states that our ability to make physical discriminations is sensitive to ratio. The threshold to distinguish between different numbers of stimuli becomes higher as the stimulus intensity becomes larger

Question 16

The symbolic distance effect is also a form of analog representations

Answer 16

This means that an adult has to think longer if a number is greater than or less than 5 if the numbers are close to 5 (like 4 or 6) than if they are distant to 5 (like 1 or 9). The closer the ratio gets to 1, the harder it is. Infants are also ratio sensitive when it comes to discriminating quantities. Infants perform better with comparisons of, for example, 8 and 16 (ratio 1:2) than with 8 and 12 (ratio 2:3 and therefore closer to 1). This happens with numbers larger than 3 and therefore shows reliance on the analog magnitude represent

Question 17

Analog representations are not precise and therefore two things can be said about the representations of numbers in children:

Answer 17

(1) the representations of numerically close quantities are similar and (2) the precision of coding becomes worse as the quantities get larger

Question 18

Older children also use the analog magnitude representation system to distinguish between different quantities. Huntley-Fenner and Cannon (2000) did an experiment in which they showed two rows of black squares to children aged 3, 4, and 5 years who had to decide which row contained the most squares. The rows varied from one to fifteen squares and made use of the ratios 1:1, 1:2 and 2:3 between the different rows. Most children did not use counting and if they did, they only did so in a minority of trials

Answer 18

If the children did count, they did not perform better than if this was not done. Children were more successful in correctly distinguishing the largest row if the ratio was distant from 1.

Question 19

During approximation calculations and exact additions, where?

Answer 19

bilateral parietal area that plays a role in visuospatial processing.Exact calculation therefore depends on numerical facts in the language area and the approximate calculation depends on visuospatial parietal networks.

Question 20

principle of cardinality

Answer 20

This means that they understand that all sets with the same number contain the same number of objects

Question 21

principle of ordinality

Answer 21

that numbers are presented in an ordered scale of magnitude (4 is always greater than 3).

Question 22

one-to-one correspondence

Answer 22

that when counting, each object may only be counted once

Question 23

pre quantitative counting

Answer 23

counting was not used to produce the same number. A child counts the objects (twice) until he reaches the correct number. In quantitative counting, the child uses one-to-one correspondence