Bilingual people are often claimed to have an advantage over monolingual people in cognitive processing owing to their ability to learn and use two languages. This advantage is considered to be related to executive function (EF). However, no consensus exists as to whether this advantage is present in the population or under which conditions it prevails. The present meta-analysis examines the bilingual advantage in EF of children aged 18 years and under for different components of inhibition (hot; rewarding stimuli/cold; neutral stimuli), attention, switching, monitoring, working memory, and planning in 143 independent group comparisons comprising 583 EF effect sizes. The bilingual advantage in overall EF was significant, albeit marginal (g = 0.06), and there were indications of publication bias. A moderator analysis showed significant group differences on EF in favor of bilinguals for studies of children from middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds and studies from one specific lab. The EF components of cold inhibition, switching, and monitoring expressed significant bilingual advantages, but monitoring and cold inhibition were affected by publication bias. As for switching, this remained significant after controlling for publication bias. Thus, given the small mean effect size and small-study effects, this meta-analysis gives little support for a bilingual advantage on overall EF. Still, also after the moderator analysis, there was a large heterogeneity of true effects and a large amount of unexplained heterogeneity in the effect sizes. Thus, there might be bilingual advantages (or disadvantages) under conditions that this study is not able to identify through the analysis of 12 moderators.

Objectives: Several studies have focused on the role of working memory (WM) in predicting mathematical and reading literacy. Alternative models of WM have been proposed and a modalitydependent model of WM, distinguishing between verbal and visuospatial WM modalities, has been advanced. In addition, the relationship between verbal and visuospatial WM and academic achievement has not been extensively and consistently studied, especially when it comes to distinguishing between mathematical and reading tasks. Method: In the present study, we tested a large group of middle school children in several measures of WM, and in mathematical and reading tasks. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses showed that verbal and visuospatial WM can be differentiated and that these factors have a different predictive power in explaining unique portions of variance in reading and mathematics. Conclusions: Our findings point to the importance of distinguishing between WM modalities in evaluating the relationship between mathematics and reading. Research highlights WM tasks can be distinguished between verbal and visuospatial modalities  Verbal WM predicts a large portion of unique variance in reading  Visuospatial WM predicts a large portion of unique variance in mathematics achievement at age 7 years.

Mammarella, IC, Donolato, E, Caviola, S and Giofré, D Anxiety profiles and protective factors: A latent profile analysis in children http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/8140/ Article LJMU has developed LJMU Research Online for users to access the research output of the University more effectively.

How sequential, verbal and visuospatial stimuli are encoded and stored in memory is not clear in cognitive psychology. Studies with order recall tasks, such as the digit, and Corsi span, indicate that order of presentation is a crucial element for verbal memory, but not for visuospatial memory. This seems to be due to the different effects of forward and backward recall in verbal and visuospatial tasks. In verbal span tasks, performance is worse when recalling things in backward sequence rather than the original forward sequence. In contrast, when it comes to visuospatial tasks, performance is not always worse for a modified backward sequence. However, worse performance in backward visuospatial recall is evident in individuals with weak visuospatial abilities; such individuals perform worse in the backward version of visuospatial tasks than in the forward version. The main aim of the present review is to summarize findings on order recall in verbal and visuospatial materials by considering both cognitive and neural correlates. The results of this review will be considered in the light of the current models of WM, and will be used to make recommendations for future studies.

Previous research examined the influence of math anxiety (MA) on performance in mathematics, but few studies compared the contribution of MA to other forms of anxiety, such as test and general anxiety (GA). Unlike MA, ego‐resiliency promotes the management of challenges, and has been positively associated with mathematics performance. In this study, we investigated the specific influence of MA, test‐ and GA, and ego‐resiliency on mathematics performance after controlling for intelligence. Children from grades 5 to 8 (N = 274) were assessed with self‐report tools measuring MA, test and GA, and ego‐resiliency, and completed intelligence and mathematical tasks. The results of structural equation models showed that MA had a main negative effect on mathematics performance, over and above the effect of test‐ and GA. Ego‐resiliency had a positive effect on mathematics performance, and was negatively associated with GA. Our findings are discussed in terms of the implications for intervention programs to reduce anxiety and sustain ego‐resiliency.