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Biomedical subjects

E Bialystok

Publications and source records attributed to E Bialystok.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Symbolic representation across domains in preschool children.

The study examines children's understanding of notational representation. Children 3 to 5 years old were shown a card containing a notation and told what it said. The children were asked to say what was printed on the card 3 times: when it was under a display named by the notation, when it was under a different display, and finally when it had been returned to the original position. In Study 1, the card contained a word or a picture indicating object identity or a numeral or an analogue indicating quantity. All the children could solve the problems containing pictures, numerals, or analogues, but the word condition was difficult and children believed that the word changed when the card moved to the new display. In Study 2, the comparison between object names and quantities was made more equitable by introducing easy and difficult versions of each condition. This time, there was little difference between cards indicating names and those indicating quantities but large differences in children's ability to solve the problem as a function of their familiarity with the notation that was written. The results point to weaknesses in children's understanding of how representations refer to meanings.

Child Development↗
PubMed2000

Languages, scripts, and the environment: factors in developing concepts of print.

Preschool children bilingual in English and Hebrew were investigated for their understanding of concepts of print by means of two tasks. In the first, children had to understand that a printed word did not change its meaning if it moved to a new location. In the second, children had to make judgments about word length and ignore the size of the named objects. Previous research had shown bilingual French-English and Chinese-English children to excel in the first task, but only older Chinese-English bilinguals had an advantage in the second. The present study extended those results by investigating the effect of writing system in more detail. The study also examined the effect of the language of the environment by conducting parallel studies in environments in which either English or Hebrew was the community language. The results show that the bilingual children in both settings were more advanced than the monolinguals in both tasks and in both settings.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2000

Representing quantity beyond whole numbers: some, none, and part.

Previous research has demonstrated how children develop the ability to use notational representations to indicate simple quantities. These studies have shown a developmental shift from the use of idiosyncratic, to analogical, to conventional, numerical notations. The present paper extends these findings by reporting the results from a study in which children from 3 to 7 years old were asked to write a representation to indicate a quantity presented in a game-like scenario. Three kinds of quantities were included: whole numbers, zeros, and fractions. The children's notations were shown to them shortly after they were produced and then again two weeks later to see if children could interpret them. The results showed the familiar developmental pattern towards increased use of conventional notations for all quantities. The ability to read the notations was greatest for conventional numbers where performance was at ceiling, lower for analogue representations, and very poor for idiosyncratic global recordings. Children's choice of a notational format was influenced almost entirely by their age and not by the quantity being represented. Children were able to solve the zero problems almost as well as they could the whole numbers, but their understanding and use of representations for fractions was very limited.

Child↗
PubMed1997

Effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on children's emerging concepts of print.

Three groups of 4- and 5-year-old children were examined for their concepts of how print refers to language. All of the children could identify printed letters and their sounds but not read alone. The groups studied were monolingual speakers of English, bilingual speakers of French and English, and bilingual speakers of Chinese (Mandarin) and English. Bilingual children were equally proficient in both languages and were familiar with print and storybooks in both languages. The tasks assessed children's understanding of the general correspondence between print and language in which the printed form represents a word and the specific correspondence between a constituent of print and one of language that determines representation in a given writing system. The general correspondence relation applies to all writing systems, but the specific correspondence relation changes for different kinds of writing systems. Bilingual children understood better than monolingual children the general symbolic representation of print. The older Chinese-English bilingual children also showed advanced understanding of the specific correspondence relations in English print.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Children's control over attention to phonological and semantic properties of words.

A study is reported in which children from 5 to 9 years old were examined as they gained awareness and control over the phonological and semantic properties of isolated words. Children were asked to match a stimulus word on the basis of either its sound or its meaning under conditions that varied in their support for the correct answer. The results are presented as discriminability data, indicating the child's ability to distinguish these properties under the different experimental conditions. Although all the children could select either of these properties in a simple control condition, adding various levels of distraction interrupted their ability to attend to the requested feature. In the age range examined, the youngest children were unable to attend selectively to either feature, older children adopted a default or bias to phonological properties, and only the oldest children were able to attend to meaning as well as sound. Even for the oldest children, however, performance was far from perfect.

Attention↗