Esther Adi-Japha

• Bar Ilan University

Understanding the long-term effect of early childhood poverty on a child’s life prospects presents a methodological challenge due to the potential endogeneity of family income, making it difficult to establish a clear causal relationship. This study addresses this challenge by exploiting a natural experiment: a major reduction in child allowances a...

Background Understanding memory retention in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared with their typically developing (TD) peers enhances our knowledge of memory processes. Aims To examine long‐term memory consolidation of a declarative object‐location task and a procedural symbol‐writing task, along with grammatical and lexica...

Background: Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) exhibit visual–motor deficits affecting handwriting. Shape tracing, a key prerequisite for handwriting, supports motor and cognitive development but remains underexplored in research, particularly in objectively studying its role in children with DCD. Objectives: To compare the kin...

Purpose The aim of the present study was twofold: to determine if deficits in motor skill proficiency and learning were present in 2-year-old children identified with early expressive language delay compared to peers without the delay, and to distinguish how motor skill proficiency and learning behaviors may manifest differently across culturally a...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced unexpected changes to ordinary societal life, including the education system. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, multiple aspects of schooling were affected, including an unexpected shift to the home environment and emphasis on online instruction, which affected children's mental health as well as their socia...

In this paper, we present a computerized tool developed specifically for a study that examined the development of creative thinking among third and fourth graders, following multidisciplinary instruction that combined mathematics and music. The computerized tool included closed and open questions. The closed questions allowed the students to perfor...

Studies suggest that the amount of practice and practice protocols can affect the long-term retention of motor skills. We tested how a practice schedule affects young adults' learning and retention of a simple grapho-motor skill. Young adults trained on the construction of a letter-form by connecting dots (Invented Letter Task, ILT) in a single-ses...

Handwriting is a perceptual-motor skill, acquired through repetitive practice. Handwriting production is most often characterized by performance speed (also termed ‘production fluency’, often assessed using text-copying tasks and legibility. Studies have found that handwriting legibility develops quickly during first grade (ages 6–7 years), reachin...

Handwriting instruction commonly involves the practice of non-linguistic writing-like patterns. Here, we compare the transfer to Arabic sentence-writing of different practice scheduling of the Invented Letter Task (ILT), a simple dot-to-dot connecting task, aiming to decide best-practice scheduling. Ninety-seven 7-to 8-year-old public-school Arab I...

This mixed-methods study focused on cross-modal change in perception of paintings, by coupling them with related musical pieces. 120 participants were assessed using an online form, distributed via social media. They were asked to choose one of three realistic or abstract paintings, evaluate their perceptual characteristics on five semantic differe...

Early Childhood Research Quarterly Volume 63, 2nd Quarter 2023, Pages 370-385 What a cool classroom! Voices of 5-year-olds on the design of physical learning environments Author links open overlay panelNetta Perry a, Esther Adi-Japha a b, Ornit Spektor-Levy a a The Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 5290002, Israel b Gonda (Goldsc...

The present study examines the development of patterns of creative thinking among third graders (N = 84) following multidisciplinary learning that combines math and music with various teaching emphases. For the purpose of the study, an intervention program was used focusing on patterns of creative thinking. Three classes received identical MusiMath...

We extended the results of a previous study suggesting that although practice in a grapho-motor task by 7-to 8-year-olds led to gains in within-session performance, no long-term gains were achieved. We then compared practice dose effects on learning and retaining the grapho-motor skill in 55 7-to 8-year-olds and in 57 young adults (18-34 years old)...

Children’s ability to transfer the gains of a motor experience, such as learning to write a letter, to novel conditions, such as cursive writing of the same letter, are affected by the way in which the learning experience is parsed. Parsing may have limitations because a short session may hamper the engagement of procedural memory consolidation pro...

Oral language proficiency in kindergarten can facilitate the acquisition of reading and writing. However, in diglossic languages, like Arabic, the large gap between the spoken and the formal, modern standard (MSA) varieties of the language may restrict the benefits of oral language proficiency to subsequent literacy skills. Here, we tested, in a ra...

Introduction: Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families, and in particular, those with a lower level of maternal education, show lower fine-motor skills and lower vocabulary scores than their SES peers whose mothers have a higher level of education. Furthermore, low SES children frequently have difficulties in reading and spelling. Thes...

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt thoughts and behaviors to new environments. Previous studies investigating cognitive flexibility in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) present contradictory findings. In the current study, cognitive flexibility was assessed in 5- and 6-year-old preschoolers with DLD ( n = 23) and peers...

Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate lower performance on creativity tasks. Yet, recent findings suggest that individuals with ASD are not necessarily impaired in verbal creativity, as measured by the novel metaphor generation task. The current study investigates verbal and figural creativity...

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners’ MSA aptitude by the end of t...

We tested how practice ‘dosing’ affects learning (within-session) and long-term retention of a grapho-motor skill in 7–8 year old children. In Experiment 1, participants practiced the production of a letter-form by connecting dots (Invented Letter Task, ILT) in a single session of 6-blocks, 12-blocks, or 24-blocks. Training on 24-blocks resulted in...

Researchers have recently queried whether musical activities that express mathematical concepts enhance young students’ math skills. The use of abstract notations for math learning is also debated. The current study examined the effect of a music intervention program on pattern and symmetry knowledge. Simple graphical notation-writing was used for...

Background DSM-5 criteria for developmental coordination disorder (DCD) emphasize deficits in the acquisition and execution of coordinated motor skills. Previous studies of motor skill learning in DCD suggest deficits in the execution of motor skills but do not reveal a deficit in learning new skills, possibly because of the heterogeneity of motor...

Practice, task repetition, constitutes a critical factor in skill acquisition. Studies in adults suggest that lasting benefits in the performance of a newly learned task may not emerge unless a certain amount of task repetitions is afforded in the training session. Here, We tested how practice ‘dose’ affects learning (within-session) and the long-t...

Music and mathematics require abstract thinking and use symbolic notations. Controversy exists regarding transfer from musical training to math achievements. The current study examined the effect of two integrated intervention programs representing holistic vs. acoustic approaches, on fraction knowledge. Three classes of fourth graders attended 12...

Do young children and adults share similar underlying motor skill learning mechanisms? Past studies have shown that school-aged children's speed of performance developed over wake periods of a few hours post-training. Such training-dependent gains were not found in adults. In the current study of children as young as 5-years-old and young adults wh...

The current study examined the effect of a friend’s presence on toddlers’ behavior in high child-to-staff-ratio daycare settings. Toddlers (N = 38) were video-observed in the presence or absence of a verified friend in two situations that burden staff: morning separation and lunchtime (overall, 152 video observations). Higher levels of positive soc...

Previous studies suggest that too short training does not lead to consolidation of a newly learned motor skill. The present study assessed the effect of prolonged practice in two schedules on the learning, consolidation and retention of a grapho-motor skill learning task, the invented letter task (ILT). Participants learned to produce an invented l...

Young adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may have an atypical procedural (“how to”) memory consolidation phase, after practicing a movement sequence, with smaller gains in speed and some costs in accuracy, compared to typical peers, at 24 hours post-training. Here we tested the susceptibility of performance gains retained a...

The current study, conducted over two years, hypothesizes a direct link between procedural learning of motor-tasks and language-related skills, such as handwriting and reading. Fifty-six children, aged 5-to 8-years, who practiced a simple grapho-motor task, improved their performance during training. Additional, consolidation ('offline'), gains wer...

Research Findings: Early child care policy and practice are grounded in a growing understanding of the importance of the first years of life. In earlier studies, associations between child–staff ratios and peer skills yielded inconsistent findings. The current study used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study o...

In the acquisition of some motor skills, sleep may be necessary for the completion of procedural memory consolidation processes, as expressed in delayed “offline” performance gains. Pan and Rickard (2015) conducted an original meta-analysis of the literature on performing an explicitly instructed finger movement sequence and tested the role of slee...

Is there late maturation of skill learning? This notion has been raised to explain an adult advantage in learning a variety of tasks, such as auditory temporal-interval discrimination, locomotion adaptation, and drawing visually-distorted spatial patterns (mirror-drawing, MD). Here, we test this assertion by following the practice of the MD task in...

Many new skills are acquired during early childhood. Typical laboratory skill learning tasks are not applicable for developmental studies that involve children younger than 8 years of age. It is not clear whether young children and adults share a basic underlying skill learning mechanism. In the present study, the learning and retention of a simple...

Purpose The current study tested whether the difficulties of children with specific language impairment (SLI) in skill acquisition are related to learning processes that occur while practicing a new skill or to the passage of time between practice and later performance. Method The acquisition and retention of a new complex grapho-motor symbol were...

Are children better than adults in acquiring new skills ('how-to' knowledge) because of a difference in skill memory consolidation? Here we tested the proposal that, as opposed to adults, children's memories for newly acquired skills are immune to interference by subsequent experience. The establishment of long-term memory for a trained movement se...

Individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have difficulties in achieving optimal performance in many everyday and academic tasks, deficits attributed to impaired skill acquisition and procedural memory consolidation. We tested the effect of a skipped dose of methylphenidate (MPH) on learning a movement sequence and its subseq...

Procedural memory refers to the long-term memory system subserving the acquisition and retention of skills and habits and relying on a system of brain structures including corticostriatal circuitry. Not only is this system important in gaining new motor skills, but also to the acquisition of skills and habits involved in implicit knowledge of langu...

Memory consolidation for a trained sequence of finger opposition movements, in 9- and 12-year-old children, was recently found to be significantly less susceptible to interference by a subsequent training experience, compared to that of 17-year-olds. It was suggested that, in children, the experience of training on any sequence of finger movements...

The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) posits that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) can be largely explained by abnormalities of brain structures that subserve procedural memory. The PDH predicts impairments of procedural memory itself, and that such impairments underlie the grammatical deficits observed in the disorder. Previous studies have in...

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to draw...

Information received by the human cortex is supplied by two main sources: extrinsic stimuli delivered by the external environment and intrinsic information regarding the body and self. We reanalyzed electrophysiological data involving the same external stimuli, but manipulating the degree of 'self-projection' to locations inside and outside the bod...

The objective of this study was to examine gender differences in the relations between verbal, spatial, mathematics, and teacher–child mathematics interaction variables. Kindergarten children (N = 80) were videotaped playing games that require mathematical reasoning in the presence of their teachers. The children’s mathematics, spatial, and verbal...

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time de...

Handwriting is one of the most complex motor proficiencies and is a main scholastic assignment during childhood. Basic skills are required for penmanship such as viso-spatial coordination on top of cognitive abilities such as planning, organizing and reviewing the written text. Illegible handwriting and increased variability both in time and space...

Localizing the source of an epileptic seizure using noninvasive EEG suffers from inaccuracies produced by other generators not related to the epileptic source. The authors isolated the ictal epileptic activity, and applied a source localization algorithm to identify its estimated location. Ten ictal EEG scalp recordings from five different patients...

Associations between parenting quality and 3-year-olds' school readiness, receptive, and expressive language were examined in relation to the amount of time they spent in childcare, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364). Associations for school readiness and receptive language were stronger among c...

We investigated gender differences in motor performance in 9-, 12-, and 17-year-olds. The tasks included simple thumb tapping (sTT), handwriting (HW) and finger-to-thumb opposition sequence (FOS) learning. In sTT there was a significant advantage for the 17-year-old males. In HW, 12-year-old females were faster, initially, than the males, but this...

The authors describe a transient phase during training on a movement sequence wherein, after an initial improvement in speed and decrease in variability, individual participants' performance showed a significant increase in variability without change in mean performance speed. Subsequent to this phase, as practice continued, variability again decre...

Control by action representation and input selection (CARIS) is a modeling framework for task-switching experiments, which considers action-related effects as critical constraints. It assumes that control operates by choosing control parameter values, representing input selection and action representation. Competing CARIS models differ in whether (...

Freeman and Adi-Japha show that drawing production necessarily involves several steps that are specifically analysed in this chapter. Forming an intention precedes and accompanies the action sequences making up the process of production. The emerging product, the trace left on the graphic surface, stimulates an interpretation that normally should c...

Multiple complaints in the domain of writing are common among children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this work we sought to characterize the writing disorder by studying dysgraphia in twenty 6th grade boys with ADHD and normal reading skills matched to 20 healthy boys who served as a comparison group. Dysgraphia, defined...

Are children superior to adults in consolidating procedural memory? This notion has been tied to "critical," early life periods of increased brain plasticity. Here, using a motor sequence learning task, we show, in experiment 1, that a) the rate of learning during a training session, b) the gains accrued, without additional practice, within a 24 ho...

When does a writing system emerge out of children's drawing to separate (a) script processing and production from (b) picture processing and production? And does one system's activation help or hinder the other system's operation? Children 4-12 years of age wrote repeated Os and Vs and drew matching shapes, in the contexts of script and of pictures...

The brain has evolved a division of labour amongst component systems which link different sorts of processing with precise actions. Debate is over centralized versus decentralized control at different processing levels, from cognitive systems to motor-control systems. With simultaneous activation of alternative expert systems which link (a) picture...

To identify and characterize early instances in which children attribute meaning to their drawings, scribbles of 2- to 3-year-olds were examined from kinematic and representational perspectives. Scribbles were shown to be composed of smooth-inertial and angular-intentional curves, the former revealing a systematic relation between curvature and spe...