Peer relationships and prosocial behaviour differences across disruptive behaviours.

It is unclear if impairments in social functioning and peer relationships significantly differ across common developmental conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and associated callous-unemotional traits (CU traits). The current study explored sex differences and symptoms of parent- and teacher-reported psychopathology on peer relationships and prosocial behaviour in a sample of 147 referred children and adolescents (aged 5-17 years; 120 m). The results showed that increases in parent-reported ADHD Inattentive symptoms and teacher-reported ADHD Hyperactive-Impulsive symptoms, CD, ODD, and CU traits were significantly associated with peer relationship problems across sex. At the same time, teacher-reported symptoms of ODD and both parent- and teacher-reported CU traits were related to difficulties with prosocial behaviour, for both boys and girls, with sex explaining additional variance. Overall, our findings show a differential association of the most common disruptive behaviours to deficits in peer relationships and prosocial behaviour. Moreover, they highlight that different perspectives of behaviour from parents and teachers should be taken into account when assessing social outcomes in disruptive behaviours. Given the questionable separation of conduct problem-related constructs, our findings not only point out the different contribution of those aspects in explaining peer relationships and prosocial behaviour, but furthermore the variance from different informants about those aspects of conduct problems.

The transposed-word effect provides no unequivocal evidence for parallel processing.

Studies using a grammaticality decision task have revealed surprising flexibility in the processing of word order during sentence reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Participants in these studies typically exhibit a transposed-word effect, in which they make more errors and slower correct responses for stimuli that contain a word transposition and are derived from grammatical as compared to ungrammatical base sentences. Some researchers have used this finding to argue that words are encoded in parallel during reading, such that multiple words can be processed simultaneously and might be recognised out of order. This contrasts with an alternative account of the reading process, which argues that words must be encoded serially, one at a time. We examined, in English, whether the transposed-word effect provides evidence for a parallel-processing account, employing the same grammaticality decision task used in previous research and display procedures that either allowed for parallel word encoding or permitted only the serial encoding of words. Our results replicate and extend recent findings by showing that relative word order can be processed flexibly even when parallel processing is not possible (i.e., within displays requiring serial word encoding). Accordingly, while the present findings provide further evidence for flexibility in the processing of relative word order during reading, they add to converging evidence that the transposed-word effect does not provide unequivocal evidence for a parallel-processing account of reading. We consider how the present findings may be accounted for by both serial and parallel accounts of word recognition in reading.

The importance of the first letter in children's parafoveal preprocessing in English: Is it phonologically or orthographically driven?

For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal preprocessing is phonologically or orthographically driven and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences that contained either a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., "circus"), a preview letter string that maintained the phonology but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P + O- preview; e.g., "sircus"), or a preview letter string that manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P- O- preview; e.g., "wircus"). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P + O- and P- O- previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding and that the first letter's orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early processing of phonology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Phonological parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English sentences.

Although previous research has shown that, in English, both adult and teenage readers parafoveally pre-process phonological information during silent reading, to date, no research has been conducted to investigate such processing in children. Here we used the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, to ascertain whether typically developing English children, like adults, parafoveally process words phonologically. Participants' eye movements (adults: n = 48; children: n = 48) were recorded as they read sentences which contained, in preview, correctly spelled words (e.g., cheese), pseudohomophones (e.g., cheeze), or spelling controls (e.g., cheene). The orthographic similarity of the target words available in preview was also manipulated to be similar (e.g., cheese/cheeze/cheene) or dissimilar (e.g., queen/kween/treen). The results indicate that orthographic similarity facilitated both adults' and children's pre-processing. Moreover, children parafoveally pre-processed words phonologically very early in processing. The children demonstrated a pseudohomophone advantage from preview that was broadly similar to the effect displayed by the adults, although the orthographic similarity of the pseudohomophone previews was more important for the children than the adults. Overall, these results provide strong evidence for phonological recoding during silent English sentence reading in 8-9-year-old children.

Parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English: The importance of external letters.

Although previous research has demonstrated that for adults external letters of words are more important than internal letters for lexical processing during reading, no comparable research has been conducted with children. This experiment explored, using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, whether parafoveal pre-processing in English is more affected by the manipulation of external letters or internal letters, and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Six previews were generated: identity (e.g., monkey); external letter manipulations where either the beginning three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., rackey) or the last three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., monhig); internal letter manipulations; e.g., machey, mochiy); and an unrelated control condition (e.g., rachig). Results indicate that both adults and children undertook pre-processing of words in their entirety in the parafovea, and that the manipulation of external letters in preview was more harmful to participants' parafoveal pre-processing than internal letters. The data also suggest developmental change in the time course of pre-processing, with children's pre-processing delayed compared to that of adults. These results not only provide further evidence for the importance of external letters to parafoveal processing and lexical identification for adults, but also demonstrate that such findings can be extended to children.

The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development.

Processing of both a word's orthography (its printed form) and phonology (its associated speech sounds) are critical for lexical identification during reading, both in beginning and skilled readers. Theories of learning to read typically posit a developmental change, from early readers' reliance on phonology to more skilled readers' development of direct orthographic-semantic links. Specifically, in becoming a skilled reader, the extent to which an individual processes phonology during lexical identification is thought to decrease. Recent data from eye movement research suggests, however, that the developmental change in phonological processing is somewhat more nuanced than this. Such studies show that phonology influences lexical identification in beginning and skilled readers in both typically and atypically developing populations. These data indicate, therefore, that the developmental change might better be characterised as a transition from overt decoding to abstract, covert recoding. We do not stop processing phonology as we become more skilled at reading; rather, the nature of that processing changes.