C D Porpodas | PubMed Health

PubMed1987

The one-question conservation experiment reconsidered.

The "extraneous reason" hypothesis, proposed as an explanation of failure in the traditional two-question conservation task, was re-examined. Two experiments were conducted involving 372 Greek children, 6-8 years old. The experiments provided evidence that the children's successful performance in the conservation task does not depend on asking them one or two questions but is causally related to their efficiency in carrying over information from the pre-transformation display. On the basis of these results, the "verbal interference hypothesis" was considered as a supplementary explanation for the children's erroneous performance in the two-question conservation task.

Child↗

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Patterns of phonological and memory processing in beginning readers and spellers of Greek.

This study examined the patterns of reading and spelling performance of first-grade Greek children who either were facing difficulties in literacy acquisition or were normal achievers. In addition, we studied the relationship between obtained literacy development levels and the children's phonological awareness and ability to retain phonological information in short-term memory. The participants were tested in the reading of single letters, letter clusters, words, and nonwords, as well as in word and nonword spelling. Furthermore, their phonological processing knowledge was assessed via a battery of phonological awareness tasks and short-term memory phonetic-representation tasks. The main findings of the study were as follows: (a) Accurate decoding of Greek was achieved by almost every young child (attributed mainly to the nature of the Greek writing system); (b) the time the children needed to process a written item was the crucial index of their difficulty in literacy acquisition; (c) spelling was performed by deriving the orthographic form of a word on the basis of sound-spelling correspondence knowledge; (d) although the children with difficulties in literacy development had achieved a satisfactory performance in phonological processing, their performance was nevertheless significantly lower than that of the normal achievers; and (e) phonemic awareness and speech rate tasks were among the best predictors of learning to read and spell Greek words.

Awareness↗