The first theme is that novice readers or calculators often use surprisingly sophisticated conceptual knowledge in their cognitive activities. In the present issue, Klein and Bisanz outline the role of early conceptual abilities in the addition performance of 4-year-olds. Sénéchal shows that 7-year-olds make use of morphological information to spell words. Bialystok and Codd explore the abilities of 3- to 7-year-olds in representing quantities. Lemaire, Lecacheur, and Farioli examine how 10-year-olds use sophisticated strategies to solve estimation problems. Across the seven papers in this issue, children showed an impressive variety of conceptual abilities, as well as some interesting limitations.

A second theme that arises from several papers in this issue is the important role for experiential factors in cognitive development. Evans, Shaw, and Bell describe the relations between parent teaching activities and reading acquisition. Miller, Major, Shu, and Zhang show how language influences children’s emerging numerical competencies. Such research suggests that closer attention to the wider community of learning that children experience will provide important insights into patterns of cognitive development.

A third theme that arose serendipitously from our selection of researchers was that four of the seven papers in this special issue include or are based solely on the performance of children who speak a language other than English (i.e., Lemaire et al.; Miller et al.; Sénéchal; Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, Lacert, & Serniclaes). Research on cognitive development should be greatly enhanced by looking beyond an Anglo-centric perspective.

A fourth theme of these papers, diversity in methodology, may represent somewhat of a departure from a typical collection of papers in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. The papers in this special issue represent a wide diversity of methods, running the gamut from correlational designs (Evans et al.) and reading-level and age-level matching designs (Sprenger-Charolles et al.) to methods that more closely resemble traditional experimental paradigms (e.g., Klein & Bisanz; Lemaire et al.; Sénéchal). We feel that all of these methods have a place in a broad understanding of cognitive development. Three- and four-year-olds are seldom amenable to the multi-trial, data-intensive approach that characterizes research on adult cognitive processes. Often, research on cognitive processes in children begins with observational studies, and progresses (slowly!) to focused experimental work. Children lead busy lives, and as researchers, we are limited in the amount of "behaviour" that we are able to extract from them. It should be clear from this set of papers that a diversity of methods does not mean a lowering of the standards for scientific research. Furthermore, each paper in this special issue presents a unique perspective, topic, or methodology, adding to the array of tools that can be accessed to advance research in this area.

In the next two sections, I will briefly discuss how each of the papers contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in the areas of either early literacy or early numeracy.

DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY LITERACY

Three of the papers in this issue address questions in the area of early literacy (Evans et al.; Sénéchal; Sprenger-Charolles et al.). The study of reading processes and reading development has a long and rich history in psychological research. Venezky (1984) suggested that "… the history of research on reading processes is for the most part the history of cognitive psychology" (p. 4). This view of the importance of research involving reading for cognitive psychology was echoed recently by Herdman (1999) in the previous special issue of this journal. Importantly, basic research findings such as the importance of phonological processes in reading acquisition should influence educational practice and presumably improve the school experience of children.

The three papers concerning literacy development in this issue deal with distinct aspects of early literacy performance. Sprenger-Charolles et al. examined evidence in favour of phonological and orthographic subtypes of dyslexia using a longitudinal sample of French-speaking children from France. Research on reading problems has a very long history in psychology and education. Sénéchal, in contrast, examined the spelling processes of French-speaking children from Canada. Research on spelling processes is comparatively new, at least from the perspective of psychological research on language.

In the third paper on early literacy, Evans et al. address the question of which experiences that occur before formal instruction are related to children’s acquisition of reading in school. This question has come and gone in various guises over the years, but enjoyed a renewed surge of interest when Teale and Sulzby (1986) edited a book entitled Emergent Literacy. Teale and Sulzby made the radical claim that children’s acquisition of literacy starts well before the onset of formal instruction in reading. Consequently, they argued that preschool children should be immersed in a language-rich environment that was filled with books, authentic literacy tasks, realistic or real literacy artifacts (such as pencils and typewriters), and that they should be given free rein to absorb and explore literacy in situ. Teale and Sulzby also claimed that behaviours such as scribbling and pretend reading were early or emergent forms of what would be called conventional literacy once children learned to read. Much of this perspective would be difficult to dispute. Children presumably will benefit in many ways from rich and varied environments that give them the opportunity to develop their cognitive abilities. What was lacking in this approach, however, were the clear links between the emergent, early, or nonconventional literacy activities and subsequent conventional literacy skills, such as the acquisition of word decoding.

One important contribution that psychologists can make to the debate on early literacy environments is to pursue the reality and direction of links between emergent and conventional literacy with methods that go beyond the observation of simple correlations between emergent abilities and later skills. Evans et al.’s paper in this issue is an excellent example of how rigorous statistical methods can help to disambiguate the sources of particular patterns of correlation. For example, children’s exposure to storybooks and their language and literacy skills are correlated in many studies (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995). Parents are routinely advised that reading to children will help them learn to read when they reach school. Evans et al. show that this seemingly obvious connection is not strongly supported by data. Instead, they found parents’ teaching of very specific early literacy skills (such as the alphabet) predicts subsequent reading skills whereas exposure to books at home does not. Reading to children, in contrast, is more likely to influence their vocabulary development than their ability to decode words (see also Sénéchal et al., 1998).

DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY NUMERACY

Although research on the numerical skills of children has a history just as long as that on reading processes (see Kilpatrick, 1992), the quantity of research on early numeracy is much less than that on early literacy. Furthermore, the transition between preschool numeracy (e.g., counting) and school-based numeracy (e.g., arithmetic) has received very little attention in the literature. One possible reason for this neglect is that literacy has traditionally been viewed as more important than numeracy. In short, parents, teachers, and educational researchers have been less concerned about children’s numerical skills than about their reading. Theoretically, this lack of attention to early numeracy may also have arisen from the Piagetian perspective that children’s quantitative abilities before age 6 or 7 are rudimentary and therefore of little interest (Geary, 1994). Whatever the reason, however, the neglect of research on numeracy is beginning to change. The range of articles in this special issue attests to the burgeoning research interest in a wide variety of numerical abilities and skills that children acquire before, during, and after the transition to formal schooling.

Geary (1995) proposed that cognitive abilities can be divided into two main categories. First, some abilities can be termed biologically primary because they have evolved over time and serve some function that has allowed humans to survive in their environments. Second, other cognitive abilities are biologically secondary, that is, transmitted or acquired mainly through cultural activities and experiences (such as formal schooling). Geary (1995) suggests, for example, that language is biologically primary whereas reading is biologically secondary. Similarly, counting small quantities may be biologically primary whereas multi-digit arithmetic operations presumably are not. Dehaene (1997) makes a related (although not identical) claim that humans acquire some numerical skills relatively easily whereas other skills require intensive instruction. For example, he suggests that children easily learn to count (with minimal instruction) because counting takes advantage of universally available competencies such as exhaustive search, verbal labelling, and one-to-one correspondence. In contrast, arithmetic operations beyond simple addition are more difficult to learn because they require mental activities for which humans are poorly prepared, such as the memorization of a large number of easily confusable pieces of information (e.g., multiplication facts). Either of these theoretical perspectives leads to the hypothesis that children may have difficulty with the transition from numerical skills that are acquired prior to schooling to those taught in school. Consistent with this view, the papers on early numeracy in this special issue touch on the issue of which numerical skills seem to be acquired early and relatively easily and which develop more slowly.

Klein and Bisanz’s research in the current issue shows that preschoolers’ numerical understanding goes beyond being able to recite the counting string or recognize Arabic digits and suggests that at least some aspects of addition are biologically primary (to use Geary’s term). Importantly, however, working memory limitations also influenced children’s performance. Lemaire et al. illustrate that the acquisition of numerical understanding is a long process. The 10-year-olds in their study were just beginning to use computational estimation on multi-digit numbers. To become successful estimators, children seem to require both some underlying computational arithmetic skills (LeFevre, Greenham, & Waheed, 1993) and large enough working memory capacities (Case & Sowder, 1990). Thus, the results of Klein and Bisanz and of Lemaire et al. converge on the conclusion that both experiential and developmental processes are important in children’s acquisition of numeracy skills.

Miller et al. provide another example of how experiential factors are important in the acquisition of numerical knowledge. Chinese-speaking children readily acquire the verbal labels for ordinal numbers whereas English-speaking children acquire ordinal number words more slowly. In Chinese, ordinal names are created by adding a prefix to the cardinal number name. In contrast, English ordinal number words are irregular and the sequence is rife with inconsistencies (i.e., first, second, third, fourth). Intriguingly, however, Miller et al. report some evidence that English-speaking children may understand the ordinal concept better than do Chinese-speaking children. Cultural influences may work in mysterious ways.

The papers on numeracy in this issue hint at a potentially interesting difference between literacy and numeracy development. Once the decoding process is mastered, literacy acquisition appears to involve many quantitative developments (more vocabulary, more grammatical knowledge) as well as some qualitative changes (improved comprehension strategies). Numerical developments, however, often involve whole new conceptual categories (consider calculus or geometry) that build upon basic knowledge (such as arithmetic) but are also distinctive disciplines in their own right. Thus, literacy development after age 8 or 9 could perhaps be characterized as "more, more, more" whereas numeracy development has many separate avenues and specific competencies. Excellence in geometry may be unrelated to performance on algebra tests, for example. These issues of the complexity of numeracy development may partially explain why research on numerical skills is not as focused as that on literacy; the field appears to be more diverse, multifaceted, and conceptually fragmented.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Preparation of this article and of the special issue was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. I thank Monique Sénéchal and Chris Herdman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this introductory article. Melanie Thompson provided invaluable assistance during the preparation of this special issue. Her organizational acumen and attention to detail was much appreciated. I would also like to thank the external reviewers, whose pithy comments contributed to the high level of quality of the final submissions.

Correspondence concerning this article can be directed to Jo-Anne LeFevre, Director, Centre for Applied Cognitive Research, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6 (E-mail: jo-anne_lefevre@carleton.ca).

Bus, A. G., van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Pellegrini, A. D. (1995). Joint book reading makes for success in learning to read: A meta-analysis on the intergenerational transmission of literacy. Review of Educational Research, 65, 1-21.

Case, R., & Sowder, J. T. (1990). The development of computational estimation: A neo-Piagetian analysis. Cognition and Instruction, 7, 79-104.

Dehaene, S. (1997). The number sense: How the mind creates mathematics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Geary, D. C. (1994). Children’s mathematical development: Research and practical applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition: Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24-37.

Herdman, C. M. (1999). Research on visual word recognition: From verbal learning to parallel distributed processing. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 269-272.

Kilpatrick, J. (1992). A history of research in mathematics education. In D. A. Grouws (Ed.), Handbook of research on mathematics teaching and learning (pp. 3-38). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.

LeFevre, J., Greenham, S. L., & Waheed, N. (1993). The development of procedural and conceptual knowledge in computational estimation. Cognition and Instruction, 11, 95-132.

Sénéchal, M., LeFevre, J., Thomas, E., & Daley, K. E. (1998). Differential effects of home literacy experiences on the development of oral and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 96-116.

Teale, W. H., & Sulzby, E. (1986). Emergent literacy as a perspective for examining how young children become writers and readers. In W. H. Teal & E. Sulzby (Eds.), Emergent literacy: Writing and reading (pp. vii-xxv). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.