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Publications (173)
Background
A number of children experience difficulties with social communication and this has long-term deleterious effects on their mental health, social development and education. The E-PLAYS-2 study will test an intervention (‘E-PLAYS’) aimed at supporting such children. E-PLAYS uses a dyadic computer game to develop collaborative and communica...
Research concerned with children and young people who have neurodevelopmental disabilities (ND) in relation to early language acquisition usually involves comparisons with matched group(s) of typically developing individuals. In these studies, several important and complex issues need to be addressed. Three major issues are related to: (1) the choi...
Little is known about the relationship between working memory (WM) abilities and reading in children with cerebral palsy (CP) who have age-appropriate communication and language. The aim of this group case study is
to analyse the WM abilities and their relationship to reading in children
with CP and age-appropriate communication and language. Fif...
Preparing young people to meet emerging contemporary challenges has become a global imperative. Over two decades, there has been a call for students’ active participation in the life of school and society, and an important feature of this call is student-led research (SLR). However, this pedagogical and empowering call with many potential benefits...
England’s national curriculum for computing for children aged five to seven years includes programming and coding aims, such as understanding algorithms; developing and using logical reasoning; creating simple programs using
unambiguous instructions; and debugging errors. Researchers have suggested that preschool children (aged two to four years)...
Many children with cerebral palsy have delay with learning to write and spell but not necessarily because of physical or intellectual difficulties, but because they have problems with visual and spatial perception.
This article in SEN magazine describes some teaching approaches that may help children with cerebral palsy (or indeed those with simil...
Vegetable consumption in young children in the UK is well below the recommended five child-sized portions per day. Effective and practical strategies are therefore needed to encourage vegetable consumption in young children. In this exploratory study, we examine the effects of visual familiarization to foods via See & Eat ebooks, which show vegetab...
Previous research suggests that students can use exploratory talk to support their thinking and learning. However, students’ own perspectives on such talk, and whether/how they value it, are rarely sought. Thirty 12-year-olds and their teacher used Talk Factory on an interactive whiteboard and iPads to support exploratory talk in English lessons tw...
This study compared the vegetable intake of preschool children from three European countries [Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom (UK)] and explored the parent, child, and environmental factors that predicted intake in each country. A total of 408 parents of preschoolers (Italy: N = 61, Poland: N = 124, and UK: N = 225; child mean age = 32.2 mont...
Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking skills in preschool children. The clubs involved fifteen children aged between 2 and 4 years, including a group of children with communication difficulties. The children took part in an action-research scoping study over three coding clubs involving six...
Background
Hebb repetition learning is a form of long-term serial order learning that can occur when sequences of items in an immediate serial recall task are repeated. Repetition improves performance because of the gradual integration of serial order information from short-term memory into a more stable long-term memory trace.
Aims
The current st...
The structure and development of executive functioning (EF) have been intensively studied in typically developing populations, with little attention given to those with Special Educational Needs (SEN). This study addresses this by comparing the EF structure of 132 adolescents (11-14 years-old) with SEN and 138 adolescents not requiring additional s...
Recent research has suggested that working-memory training interventions may benefit children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The current study investigated a short and engaging adaptive working-memory intervention that targeted executive skills and aimed to improve both language comprehension and working-memory abilities in children wi...
Recent research has suggested that working memory training interventions may benefit children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The current study investigated a short and engaging adaptive working memory intervention that targeted executive skills and aimed to improve both language comprehension and working memory abilities in children wi...
Decoding abilities in individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) are substantially lower than for typical readers. The underlying mechanisms of their poor reading remain uncertain. The aim of this study was to investigate the concurrent predictors of decoding ability in 136 adolescents with non-specific ID, and to evaluate the results in relat...
Given the developmental inter-relationship between motor ability and spatial skills, we investigated the impact of physical disability (PD) on spatial cognition. Fifty-three children with special educational needs including PD were divided into those who were wheelchair users (n = 34) and those with independent locomotion ability (n = 19). This div...
Reading comprehension difficulties are common in individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID), but the influences of underlying abilities related to reading comprehension in this group have rarely been investigated. One aim of this study was to investigate the Simple View of Reading as a theoretical framework to describe cognitive and linguistic...
Background
This article reports the results from a feasibility study of an intervention (‘E-PLAYS’) aimed at supporting children who experience difficulties with social communication. E-PLAYS is based around a dyadic computer game, which aims to develop collaborative and communication skills. A pilot study found that when E-PLAYS was delivered by r...
We wanted to find out if children as young as two years old would be able to learn concepts related to programming and coding through guided play activities.
This article describes some of the activities which took place in the initial session of a pilot study to teach a group of children, aged between two and four years of age, computational think...
On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investigated the impact of physical disability (PD) on spatial cognition. Fifty-three children with special educational needs including PD took part. The children with PD were divided into those who were wheelchair users (N=34) and those who had independent lo...
Increased fruit and vegetable consumption is important for children’s healthy eating. Although repeated taste exposures are effective in supporting children’s acceptance of healthy foods, more enjoyable interventions that increase children’s familiarity with foods through other sensory modalities can also be helpful. Picture book interventions, whi...
Working memory refers to the mental workspace that allows us to temporarily hold and manipulate information in order to carry out day‐to‐day thinking and reasoning tasks. The well‐established working memory model, with its four separate components (central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer), highlights that worki...
In recent years, executive functioning has received considerable attention from researchers, and this entry provides reasons for this interest. The entry gives an outline of what is meant by the term executive functioning , discusses its importance, and describes its assessment and development until adolescence. Then there is a discussion of the wa...
Background:
A number of children experience difficulties with social communication and this has long-term deleterious effects on their mental health, social development and education. The proposal presented in this article describes a feasibility study for a trial to test an intervention ('E-PLAYS') aimed at supporting children with social communi...
Use of verbal rehearsal is a key issue in memory development. However, we still lack detailed and triangulated information about the early development and the circumstances in which different forms of rehearsal are used. To further understand significant factors that affect children’s use of various forms of rehearsal, the present study involving 1...
Background: This investigation addresses the question of whether there exists a significant discrepancy in the cognitive abilities of children with cerebral palsy (CP) who, despite the presence of age appropriate communication and language, have reading and spelling delays. Aims: We wanted to discover whether there was a relationship between the ph...
This investigation concerns two questions: i). is simple educational programming with children, compared to working on mathematical tasks, more effective in increasing scores in mathematical abilities, spatial awareness and working memory? ii), is educational programming on a digital device, compared to similar paper and pencil programming activiti...
Background: Previous research suggests that children with cerebral palsy (CP) have impairments in visual-spatial and mathematics abilities, although we know very little about the association between these two domains. / Aims: To investigate the extent of visual-spatial and mathematical impairments in children with CP and the associations between th...
There has been considerable debate and interest in the factor structure of executive functioning (EF). For children and young people, there is evidence of a progression from a single factor to a more differentiated structure, although the precise nature of these factors differs between investigations. The purpose of the current study was to look at...
Purpose
In the UK, concern frequently has been voiced that young people lack appropriate employability skills. One way to address this is to provide work based placements. In general, previous research findings have indicated that young people find such placements useful because of help with career choice and relevant skills. However, most studies...
Several arguments have been put forward about the benefits of young people carrying out their own social science research in terms of empowering their voices and their participation. Much less attention has been paid to investigating the understandings young people develop about the research process itself. Seven twelve-year olds carried out self-d...
Background and aims
There are few investigations of the relationship between cognitive abilities (memory, language, and attention) and children’s eyewitness performance in typically developing children, and even fewer in children on the autism spectrum. Such investigations are important to identify key cognitive processes underlying eyewitness reca...
The executive function of fluency describes the ability to generate items according to specific rules. Production of words beginning with a certain letter (phonemic fluency) is impaired in dyslexia, while generation of words belonging to a certain semantic category (semantic fluency) is typically unimpaired. However, in dyslexia, verbal fluency has...
Background
A cost‐effective method to address reading delays is to use computer‐assisted learning, but these techniques are not always effective.
Methods
We evaluated a commercially available computer system that uses visual mnemonics, in a randomised controlled trial with 78 English‐speaking children (mean age 7 years) who their schools identifie...
Background:
There is a long-held view that verbal short-term memory problems of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) might be due to a deficit in verbal rehearsal. However, the evidence is inconclusive and word length effects as indicator of rehearsal have been criticised.
Aim & method:
The aim of this multi-site European study was to...
This study examined the development of phonological recoding in short-term memory (STM) span tasks among two clinical groups with contrasting STM and language profiles: those with Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS). Phonological recoding was assessed by comparing: (1) performance on phonologically similar and dissimilar items (phonologic...
Background:
Executive functioning (EF) deficits are well recognized in developmental dyslexia, yet the majority of studies have concerned children rather than adults, ignored the subjective experience of the individual with dyslexia (with regard to their own EFs), and have not followed current theoretical perspectives on EFs.
Aims and methods:
T...
Background:
Few investigations have examined the relationship between a comprehensive range of executive functioning (EF) abilities and reading.
Aims:
Our investigation identified components of EF that independently predicted single word reading, and determined whether their predictive role remained when additional variables were included in the...
There are indications that different types of maltreatment can lead to different cognitive and behavioural outcomes. This study investigated whether maltreatment type was related to executive functioning (EF) abilities and the use of inner speech. Forty maltreated adolescents and a comparison group of 40 non‐maltreated typically developing adolesce...
This paper is concerned with a so far little explored situational context: sharing books which have been personalised for individual children in a pre-school. Thirty-five children (mean age 36.94 months) were read a book with a personalised and non-personalised part. Their spontaneous verbal responses were video recorded and later transcribed. The...
This study explores the themes in the talk of two mothers and daughters as they share a self-created story with an iPad app. Vygotsky's theory of learning is applied to inform a thematic analysis and help interpret the learning potential within the observed parent–child exchanges. A deductive–inductive thematic analysis identified three recurring t...
Abstract: In this paper we discuss the potential of iPads for supporting literacy learning in special education, with a focus on how the gestural and sensory experience of touch can enable young learners with moderate to complex physical and/or cognitive disability to engage in fun, independent and inclusive classroom-based literacy activities. We...
In this paper, we discuss how iPads offer innovative opportunities for early literacy learning but also present challenges for teachers and children. We lent iPads to a Children’s Centre nursery (3- to 4-year-olds), a primary school reception class (4- to 5-year-olds) and a Special School (7- to 13-year-olds), discussed their potential uses with st...
This study examines whether books that contain personalized content are better facilitators of young children’s word acquisition than books which are not personalized for a child. In a repeated-measures experimental design, 18 children (mean age 3;10) were read a picture book which contained both personalized and non-personalized sections, with unk...
Research suggests that children exposed to maltreatment have deficits in executive functioning (EF) but few studies have focused on the adolescent age group. We investigated whether maltreated adolescents had lower EF abilities compared to a group of non-maltreated adolescents. Forty adolescents with histories of child maltreatment, together with a...
The two case studies reported in this clinical exchange describe the way in which iPads can foster children’s motivation to engage in communication and literacy-related activities such as story-sharing and story-creation. A detailed description of a particular iPad app (Our Story) is provided, along with observations of the implementation of this a...
This study investigates the effects of a story-making app called Our Story and a selection of other educational apps on the learning engagement of forty-one Spanish 4–5-year-olds. Children were observed interacting in small groups with the story-making app and this was compared to their engagement with a selection of construction and drawing apps....
A relatively quick, face-to-face, adaptive working memory training intervention was assessed in 5- to 8-year-old typically developing children, randomly allocated to a 6-week intervention condition, or an active control condition. All children received 18 sessions of 10 minutes, three times/week for 6 weeks. Assessments of six working memory skills...
Little is known about how specific iPad applications affect parent–child story-sharing interactions. This study utilises a case-study approach to provide an insight into the patterns of interaction, which emerge when a mother and her 33-month-old daughter share a self-created, audio-visual ‘iPad story’. Multimodal analysis allowed us to gain insigh...
Word finding difficulties (WFDs) occur in more than a quarter of children who are receiving speech and language therapy. This study provides the first investigation of the continuity in WFDs and investigates whether WFDs are associated with phonological or semantically related abilities. Thirty-eight children with WFDs were seen at age 7;0 and at 9...
Williams (WS) and Down (DS) syndromes have been associated with specifically compromised short-term memory (STM) subsystems. Individuals with WS have shown impairments in visuospatial STM, while individuals with DS have often shown problems with the recall of verbal material. However, studies have not usually compared the development of STM skills...
Conceptualizing the underlying representations and cognitive mechanisms of children's spelling development is a key challenge for literacy researchers. Using the Representational Redescription model (Karmiloff-Smith), Critten, Pine and Steffler (2007) demonstrated that the acquisition of phonological and morphological knowledge may be underpinned b...
The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of personalized books on parents' and children's engagement during shared book reading. Seven native English parents and their children aged between 12 and 33 months were observed at home when sharing a book made specifically for the child (i.e. a personalized book), a comparable book with no per...
Research over the past decade indicates that adolescents who have experienced childhood maltreatment have more emotional and behavioural disturbances and less socially desirable or adaptive behaviours than typically developing adolescents. These difficulties are consistent with weaknesses in executive functioning skills. Executive functioning (EF),...
Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual...
An investigation was carried out into the phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and visuospatial short-term memory (VSSTM) skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI; n = 41) using memory span tasks. Individuals with SLI were compared with children who had milder
degrees of language difficulty (“low language functioning” [LLF]; n = 3...
Children with intellectual disability (ID) were given a comprehensive range of executive functioning measures, which systematically varied in terms of verbal and non-verbal demands. Their performance was compared to the performance of groups matched on mental age (MA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Twenty-two children were included in ea...
Objectives. This study investigated the role of family variables in the development of psychological problems in childhood sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, contributing to the debate between the ‘abuse related’ perspective, which assumes a direct causal link between abuse and later problems, and the ‘family dysfunction’ perspective, which assumes that...
In order to understand better the lexical access abilities in children with word-finding difficulties, the extent of serial naming speed difficulties in these children as well as the degree to which serial and discrete naming tasks are related to one another and to literacy abilities was investigated. This enabled some of the predictions made in th...
A limited range of evidence suggests that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulties with higher order thinking and reasoning skills (executive functioning, EF). This study involved a comprehensive investigation of EF in this population taking into account the contributions of age, nonverbal IQ and verbal ability.
Ten separa...
Karmiloff-Smith's model of representational redescription describes development proceeding from implicit to explicit knowledge. During part of this process, knowledge is said to be resistant to external influences. However, a study carried out by Messer, Joiner, Loveridge, Light & Littleton (1993) indicated that peer interaction can assist progress...
Background. The Representational Redescription model of cognitive development (Karmiloff‐Smith, 1992) identified a level when a child's representation of a task may be incorrect but difficult to access or change. On the balance beam task children at this level have been found to hold a fixed belief that all objects must balance at their geometric c...
The propsed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of parent-child engagement in home book reading needs to be at the heart of new interventions in this area. The rationale for this project was to offer a practical solution to concerns about the challenges posed by traditional shared book reading intervent...
Few studies have investigated children's responses to television alcohol advertising. Two separate studies evaluated the appeal of alcohol advertisements on children aged 7-10. An exploratory interview study (N = 17) was carried out to assess children's verbal responses to both alcohol and non-alcohol advertisements and to elicit vocabulary to be u...
Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically de...
Abstract Following an initial survey of microcomputer use in Hertfordshire primary schools, a second, follow-up survey was conducted two years later to examine how experience had changed attitudes and use. This second survey provided detailed information of microcomputer provision, classroom use, and an analysis of factors which were related to use...
Abstract An exhaustive survey of Hertfordshire primary schools was completed which provides detailed information of microcomputer-provision, classroom use, headteachers' and teachers' aims and attitudes, and an analysis of factors which influence use. The survey was in two parts: an initial questionnaire to identify the extent of microcomputer owne...
Children’s understanding of the way objects balance has provided important insights about cognitive development (e.g. Siegler, 1976; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). We investigated the performance of 86 children aged between 5 and 7 years to see whether their cognitions about balance were consistent across different types of balance task. The children did...
We present a microgenetic analysis of the gestures that children produce as they talk about a balance task. Children gesture spontaneously on this task and here their hand gestures are considered in relation to the accompanying speech. By close examination of 21 children's single sessions, and the 163 iconic gestures they produced (a mean of 7.6 ge...
To examine whether lexical access problems in children with word finding difficulties (WFDs) are restricted to measures of naming or include wider language impairments and the extent to which language skills are related to performance in the accuracy, latency and definitions of lexical items that are comprehended.
Thirty-one children with identifie...
Atypical vocabulary has been reported as one of the most notable features of the language of adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome (WS), including use of unusual or low frequency words. Two hypotheses were identified regarding the developmental origins of this phenomenon. The intra-lexicon hypothesis views the cause in terms of domain-speci...
Purpose
There is a substantial minority of children for whom lexical retrieval problems impede the normal pattern of language development and use. These problems include accurately producing the correct word even when the word’s meaning is understood. Such problems are often referred to as word-finding difficulties (WFDs). This article examines the...
Studies of peer interaction among children have generally shown that this experience aids performance, or at the very least does not result in poorer performance in relation to control conditions. Furthermore, working with a more able partner has been found to be a particularly effective form of peer interaction. In contrast, a model proposed by Ka...
Objectives: This study assesses theimplications and cost-effectiveness of extending the role of midwives toinclude the routine (24-hour) examination of the healthy newborn usuallycarried out by junior doctors.