No abstract

The research addresses the role of lexical analogies in early reading by examining variation in children's self-reported strategy choices in the context of a traditional clue-word reading task. Sixty 5-to 6-year-old beginning readers were given a nonword version of a traditional clue-word reading analogy task, and changes in strategies were examined using measures of immediately retrospective verbal reports. The findings revealed that the children's performance was accompanied by their use of a wide repertoire of reading strategies, the most prominent being the use of lexical analogies and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules. Distinct profiles of reading were derived from an analysis of the children's strategy choice, showing strong patterns of individual differences with regard to the extent to which children reported making analogical responses and applying grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules to aid their nonword reading. The benefits of using immediately retrospective verbal reports of strategies as a way of examining individual differences in children's early reading are discussed.

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No abstract

The study addresses the relational reasoning of different‐aged children and how addition reasoning is related to problem‐solving skills within addition and to reasoning skills outside addition. Ninety‐two 5‐ to 8‐year‐olds were asked to solve a series of conceptually related and unrelated addition problems, and the speed and accuracy of all self‐reported strategies were used to monitor their addition performance. Children were also given a series of general relational reasoning tasks to assess their ability to solve problems based on thematic, causal and visual relations. The results revealed that, while children were able to reason about commutativity relations, recognition of relations based on additive composition was rare. Furthermore, children's ability to reason about addition concepts increased with age and problem‐solving proficiency. Reasoning about addition concepts was related to performance on the thematic, causal and visual reasoning tasks for older children but not for younger children. Overall, the findings suggest that while children's early knowledge of addition relations is domain specific, as children develop in their broader reasoning abilities these developments enhance their addition reasoning.