Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five alphabetic orthographies with different degrees of orthographic complexity (English, French, German, Dutch, and Greek). Path analyses revealed that a universal model could not be confirmed. When we specified the best-fitting model separately for each language, RAN was a consistent predictor of reading fluency in all orthographies, whereas the association between PA and reading was complex and mostly interactive. We conclude that RAN taps into a language-universal cognitive mechanism that is involved in reading alphabetic orthographies (independent of complexity), whereas the PA-reading relationship depends on many factors like task characteristics, developmental status, and orthographic complexity. Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have consistently been found to be closely associated with children's reading development explaining unique variance in children's reading skills above and beyond general factors like age and nonverbal IQ (Araújo, Reis, Petersson, & Faísca, 2015; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012; Norton & Wolf, 2012). PA refers to the ability to identify and manipulate phonological segments in spoken words, and RAN denotes the ability to name serial displays of letters, digits, pictured objects, or colors as quickly as possible. PA is important as all orthographic systems represent phonological units in one way or another. Children with deficient access to the relevant phonological units will have problems to fully understand the mappings between a certain spoken language and its orthography and training of PA seems to improve reading outcomes (e.g., Suggate, 2016). An important and as yet unresolved issue is whether PA precedes reading acquisition or whether it evolves as a consequence or during the course of learning to read (

Background: The Boston Naming Test is widely used in several versions and languages. However, there are few studies of its use with bilingual adults. A recent study by Kohnert, Hernandez, and Bates (1998) found that Spanish/English bilingual adults scored well below unilingual adults. Aims: This study tested two hypotheses. (1) Fluently bilingual adults will obtain significantly lower scores than unilingual, English-speaking adults on the BNT, in English. (2) The order of difficulty of the 60 items will differ for the bilingual and unilingual groups. Methods & Procedures:This study compared the English performance of unilingual speakers (n = 42) to that of two groups of bilingual adults: Spanish/English (n = 32) and French/English (n = 49). All bilingual participants learned English as a second language as children and claimed high levels of ability in English. All participants completed high school (range 11-27 years of schooling). The three groups did not differ significantly in age or education. An ANOVA compared the mean Total Correct obtained by the three groups. Outcomes & Results: Both hypotheses were confirmed. The mean scores (Total Corrrect) for the bilingual groups (42.6 and 39.5/60) were both significantly below the mean score of the unilingual group (50.9/60) but not different from each other. Item difficulty showed some similarities but also important differences across groups. Conclusions: The English language norms cannot be used, even with proficient bilingual speakers. Cultural factors appear less important than bilingualism. Some items on the Boston Naming Test have more than one correct name and suggestions for ''lenient'' scoring are given.

This article introduces a bilingual version of a dual coding model of language and cognition. The model specifies the functional relations between the verbal symbolic systems that underlie the bilingual's two languages and a third (image) system specialized for processing information about nonverbal objects and events. The three systems are assumed to be capable of functioning independently. At the same time, they can interact because of interconnections that permit one system to initiate activity in another. The image system, representing knowledge of the world, is connected to both verbal systems. The verbal systems are interconnected via representations corresponding to translation equivalents, thereby approximating one-to-one relations as compared to the one-to-many relations that characterize the associative networks within each language system. Implications of the model are discussed with reference to several current issues in the psychology of bilingualism.

The authors review the scientific evidence regarding the prediction of reading development from six cognitive constructs: phonological awareness, phonological decoding, naming speed, orthographic processing, morphological awareness, and vocabulary. The authors describe the theoretical connexions amongst these indicators and word reading. The authors conclude that there is substantial evidence of each contributing to reading, and in most cases, this contribution is above and beyond that of the other predictor constructs. These findings have implications for early and regular cognitive assessment, and for curriculum development and teacher education.Our goal in this paper is to review evidence concerning six major factors that have been shown to be related to reading development. We chose to focus on cognitive factors, not because motivation and self-perception are unimportant, but rather because the cognitive factors are more plausible causes of reading development. We also confined our discussion to specific cognitive factors that are involved in the process of reading, rather than on more general cognitive factors, such as intelligence, that are related to a broader range of behaviours, and whose specific causal role is more difficult to establish. Similarly, we omitted the various demographic characteristics that have been related to reading, such as gender and socioeconomic status (SES), partly because it is difficult to establish their causal status or exercise an infiuence on them, but also because, like the socioemotional factors, they operate on reading through the cognitive mechanisms that support reading. Finally, we focus on word reading, and not on reading comprehension. We do this partly because of the evidence that reading comprehension depends upon word reading (e.g., Adams, 1990), and partly because the cognitive factors on which we focus have a more proximal relationship to the more basic aspects of reading.We seek to understand the longitudinal predictors of reading for two reasons. First, because reading is a critical academic skill and because it takes so long to acquire, we would like to be able to predict reading difficulties before they occur and act to prevent them as best we can. Second, because the cognitive processes involved in learning to read are diverse and causally tangled, we explore the development of reading and its underlying processes so that we can untangle these causal relations. The first justification should lead to better'educational practise, the second to better theory and practise.Reading instruction, broadly speaking, includes the intended curriculum, classroom teaching methods, assessment practises, remedial practises, and so on. These practises tend to develop in an ad hoc manner, with relatively little input from theory. Curriculum planners and classroom teachers are often not in a good position to judge theories and the evidence upon which they are based. Therefore, we see it as the responsibility of researchers in psychology and educational psychology to provide t...

Because of uncertainties in manufacturing processes, a mechanical part always shows variations in its geometrical characteristics (ex. form, dimension, orientation and position). Quality then often reflect how well tolerances and hence, functional requirements, are being achieved by the manufacturing processes in the final product. From a design perspective, efficient methods must be made available to compute, from the tolerances on individual parts, the value of the functional requirement on the final assembly. This is known as tolerance analysis. To that end, existing methods, often based on modeling of the open kinematic chains in robotics, are classified as deterministic or statistical. These methods suppose that the assembled parts are not perfect with regard to the nominal geometry and are rigid. The rigidity of the parts implies that the places of contacts are regarded as points. The validation or the determination of a tolerance zone is therefore accomplished by a series of simulation in specific points subjected to assembly constraints. To overcome the limitations and difficulties of point based approaches, the paper proposes the unification of two existing models: the Jacobian’s matrix model, based on the infinitesimal modeling of open kinematic chains in robotics, and the tolerance zone representation model, using small displacement screws and constraints to establish the extreme limits between which points and surfaces can vary. The approach also uses interval algebra as a novel method to take tolerance boundaries into account in tolerance analysis. The approach has been illustrated on a simple two parts assembly, nevertheless demonstrating the capability of the method to handle three-dimensional geometry. The results are then validated geometrically, showing the overall soundness of the approach.