Shelley Shaul

Shelley Shaul
University of Haifa | haifa · Department of Learning Disabilities

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46
Publications
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738
Citations

Publications

Publications (46)
Article
Full-text available
While the multiple cognitive deficits model of reading difficulties (RD) is widely supported, different cognitive‐linguistic deficits may manifest differently depending on language and writing system characteristics. This study examined cognitive‐linguistic profiles underlying RD in Hebrew, characterised by rich Semitic morphology and two writing v...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the contribution of early executive functions (EFs) in the association between fluency in reading and arithmetic. Kindergarten children (N = 1185) were assessed on executive functions skills and on reading and arithmetic fluency in Grade 1 and Grade 3. The analysis revealed that beyond the connection within each domain there is...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction The acquisition of reading skills is a crucial milestone in early education, with formal instruction and practice playing pivotal roles. The outbreak of COVID-19 led to widespread school closures and a shift to remote learning. Methods This study aimed to investigate the effects of school closures on reading acquisition and fluency am...
Article
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The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with its...
Preprint
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This study examines the contribution of early executive functions (EFs) in the association between fluency in reading and arithmetic. Kindergarten children (N = 1,185) were assessed on Executive Functions skills and on reading and arithmetic fluency in Grade 1 and Grade 3. The analysis revealed that beyond the connection within each domain there is...
Article
Full-text available
Background The working memory (WM) system is recognized as a crucial cognitive function that underpins the acquisition of new knowledge and the development of foundational skills during childhood. Children’s early literacy and numeracy skills lay the foundation for future academic success in reading and mathematics. While previous research has esta...
Article
Full-text available
The working memory system supports learning processes such as acquiring new information and the development of new skills. Working memory has been found to be related to both early literacy and early numeracy in kindergarten and to linguistic and mathematical academic skills at older ages, but the contribution of each of the memory components at th...
Article
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Background Many studies have examined which kindergarteners’ skills best predict reading acquisition later at school. Most of these studies focused on emergent literacy skills such as letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and oral language abilities as the basis for reading acquisition. Additionally, several studies have also found cognitive sk...
Article
Full-text available
Early numeracy and literacy skills are all the knowledge that children acquire spontaneously and independently before entering school and beginning formal learning. This knowledge is essential and forms the basis for the acquisition of reading and arithmetic in school. A bilingual child is a child who is fluent in two languages, as opposed to a mon...
Article
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Many studies have attempted to identify measures that predict reading abilities. The results of these studies may be inclined to over-identification of children considered at risk in kindergarten but who achieve parity in reading by the end of first grade. Therefore, the current study sought to analyze the specific cognitive and linguistic predicto...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated the underlying cognitive abilities which are related to both fluency in reading and arithmetic across different developmental phases of their acquisition. An unselected sample of children in first (N = 83), second (N = 66), and third (N = 67) grades completed several reading and arithmetic fluency tasks, as well as rapid aut...
Article
Full-text available
The present study compared the semantic processing of pictures and words by dyslexics to that of typical readers utilizing the electro-physiological (ERP) technique during a semantic categorization decision task. ERPs of 40 university students, 20 typical readers and 20 dyslexic readers were recorded while they participated in a categorization deci...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the current study was two-fold. It aimed (i) to examine how a multi-component task, as well as more specific executive function (EF) tasks, are related to a wide range of early literacy (phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, word writing) and emergent mathematical abilities; and (ii) to broaden our understanding of the similar...
Chapter
Most research on the development of reading has focused on linguistic abilities, such as naming and phonological awareness, and their role in reading, recent studies have found several specific cognitive dimensions to be associated with the development of early decoding and word recognition skills such as visual attention span, working memory and e...
Chapter
Full-text available
The present study examines the contributions of several different cognitive and literacy skills to reading fluency in Hebrew among Grade 1 students. The main objective of the study was to examine what predicts word reading fluency at two crucial points during Grade 1: mid-year, before a multi-tiered intervention, and again 12 weeks later at the end...
Article
Full-text available
It has been well established that poor reading skills in the first grades of primary school can lead to poor reading skills in all coming years. A reading acceleration program (RAP) known to improve reading skills in adults and children with and without reading difficulties (RD) was tested for its effect on children in second grade with standard re...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study was to test that the ability to obtain information about more than one letter at a glance develops prior to conventional reading. This study included 55 Dutch-speaking prereaders (mean age 63.56 months, SD = 6.55) and 45 Hebrew-speaking prereaders (mean age = 66.71 months, SD = 8.35). In a perceptual span task, one letter was...
Article
In this study we examine the impact and the interplay of general giftedness (G) and excellence in school mathematics (EM) on students' mathematical performance associated with translations from graphical to symbolic representations of functions as reflected in cortical electrical activity (by means of ERP - Event Related Potentials - methodology)....
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a small part of a larger interdisciplinary study that investigates brain activity (using event related potential methodology) of male adolescents when solving mathematical problems of different types. The study design links mathematics education research with neurocognitive studies. In this paper we performed a comparative analy...
Article
Full-text available
The current study reports on 9-year-old monozygotic twin girls who fail to make any progress in learning basic mathematics in primary education. We tested the hypothesis that the twins' core maths problems were deficits in number sense that manifested as impairments in approximate and small number systems, resulting in impairment in nonsymbolic as...
Article
This study explores the effects of the presence of external representations of a mathematical object (ERs) on problem solving performance associated with short double-choice problems. The problems were borrowed from secondary school algebra and geometry, and the ERs were either formulas, graphs of functions, or drawings of geometric figures. Perfor...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Attention ability can be divided into three separate networks (executive, orienting, and alerting) that differ in their function and neurobiology. It has been suggested that the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ) can gate between the orienting and the alerting systems. Because there is converging evidence suggesting that the right T...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study was to identify the specific contribution of executive functions to pre-academic skills (emergent literacy, phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge, and emergent mathematic knowledge) over and above cognitive and linguistic underpinning abilities such as naming, short-term memory and vocabulary. The study was designe...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study was to extend our understanding of the "asynchrony" phenomenon by examining the existence of several additional differences in brain activity. The differences which were investigated were the difference between the left and right hemisphere processing, the anterior and posterior areas processing and the differences between the...
Article
Full-text available
Poor reading skills of developmental dyslexics persist into adulthood with standard remediation protocols having little effect. Nevertheless, reading improves if readers are induced to read faster. Here we show that this improvement can be enhanced by training. Training follows a multi-session procedure adapted to silent sentence reading, with indi...
Conference Paper
This paper presents a part of Multidimensional Examination of Mathematical Giftedness. This part is focuses on brain activity (using Event-Related Potentials methodology) associated with solving short choice-reaction insight-based mathematical problems. We report on the findings related to 70 right hand male-students who were chosen for comparative...
Article
In recent years many studies have focused on brain activity differences between fluent and dyslexic readers in order to understand the neural basis of dyslexia. The aim of the current study was to examine the processing of words and pseudo-words in the two hemispheres among dyslexic as compared to fluent readers, using behavioral, and electrophysio...
Chapter
The chapter examines whether the cognitive deficits that young dyslexic’s (4th graders) exhibit are similar to those of adult university students dyslexics, in addition to their outcomes of intervention. This question was investigated with the use of behavioral, electrophysiological and source estimation of brain activation measures. The results re...
Article
Full-text available
This study examined the differences in processing between regular and dyslexic readers in a lexical decision task in different visual field presentations (left, right, and center). The research utilized behavioral measures that provide information on accuracy and reaction time and electro-physiological measures that permit the examination of brain...
Article
Error processing in corrected and uncorrected errors was studied while participants responded to a target surrounded by flankers. Error-related negativity (ERN/NE) was stronger and appeared earlier in corrected errors than in uncorrected errors. ERN neural sources for each error type were analyzed using low-resolution electromagnetic tomography met...
Article
Full-text available
While measuring event-related brain potentials, a divided visual field paradigm was used to discern laterality patterns of the error-related negativity (ERN) in healthy human participants. Two tasks of hemispheric specialty were used (bargraph judgement, lexical decision) and a flanker task. For corrected errors in all tasks, stronger ERN amplitude...
Article
Most of the research into dyslexia has been carried out among children and has raised the question whether the characteristics of young dyslexics are similar to those of adult dyslexics. The aim of this research was, therefore, to confirm whether the cognitive deficits, which appear among young dyslexics on reading and reading related tasks, are si...
Article
Full-text available
The authors examined the differences in performance between 30 dyslexic readers in 4th grade, 30 dyslexic readers attending university, and age-matched normal readers for both groups on a lexical decision task to evaluate the underlying factors of dyslexia that persist into adulthood. In both age groups, the dyslexic readers were significantly less...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the present study was to examine differences among regular and dyslexic adult bilingual readers when processing reading and reading related skills in their first (L1 Hebrew) and second (L2 English) languages. Brain activity during reading Hebrew and English unexpected sentence endings was also studied. Behavioral and electrophysiological...
Chapter
Full-text available
Although perceptual processes during reading are activated by the visual and auditory modalities the activation itself starts with visual identification and perception of printed materials. The basic question of interest in this chapter is whether visual processing among dyslexics is impaired when compared with that of regular readers. The focus of...
Chapter
Full-text available
Electrophysiological methods are based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) data, and EEG methods are used to assess on-line processing of cognitive activity focusing on the measurement of Event-Related Potentials (ERP). This method permits direct observation of information processing at different levels of analysis; it can provide crucial information reg...

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