Heinz Wimmer

Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception

‘A travelling salesman found himself spending the night at home with his wife when one of his trips was unexpectedly cancelled. The two of them were sound asleep, when in the middle of the night there was a loud knock at the front door. The wife woke up with a start and cried out, ‘Oh, my God! It’s my husband!* Whereupon the husband leapt out from the bed, ran across the room and jumped out the window.’ Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 59.

John Thinks That Mary Thinks That - Attribution of 2nd-Order Beliefs by 5-Year-Old to 10-Year-Old Children

Abstract Understanding of second-order belief structures by 5- and 10-year-old children was assessed in acted stories in which two characters (John and Mary) were independently informed about an objects (ice-cream vans) unexpected transfer to a new location. Hence both John and Mary knew where the van was but there was a mistake in Johns second-order belief about Marys belief: “John thinks Mary thinks the van is still at the old place”. Childrens understanding of this second-order belief was tested by asking “Where does John think Mary will go for ice cream?” Correct answers could only be given if Johns second-order belief was represented, since all shortcut reasoning based on first-order beliefs would have led to the wrong answer. Results suggested unexpected early competence around the age of 6 and 7 years, shown under optimal conditions when inference of second-order beliefs was prompted.

Characteristics of developmental dyslexia in a regular writing system

The present study assessed reading difficulties and cognitive impairments of German-speaking dyslexic children at grade levels 2, 3, and 4. It was found that German dyslexic children suffered from a pervasive speed deficit for all types of reading tasks, including text, high frequency words, and pseudowords, but at the same time showed generally rather high reading accuracy. For pseudowords, reading refusals or word responses were absent, and the majority of errors was close to the target pronunciation. Reading speed seemed to be most impaired for pseudowords and function words that did not allow the children to take a short-cut from phonemically mediated word processing. The discussion offers a developmental framework for the interpretation of these reading difficulties. For the cognitive tasks, dyslexic children did not differ from age-matched control children on the pseudoword repetition task or the digit span task, indicating that auditory perception and memory were not impaired. On phonological awareness tasks (rhyme oddity detection, vowel substitution, and pseudoword spelling), dyslexic children scored lower than age-matched control children, but not lower than younger reading-level control children. The performance of the dyslexic children on the phonemic segmentation tasks (pseudoword spelling and vowel substitution) was high in absolute terms. In contrast, marked differences between dyslexic and age-matched controls were found on rapid naming tasks: dyslexic grade 4 children showed lower numeral-naming speed than reading-level grade 2 children. Numeral-naming speed turned out to be the most important predictor of reading speed differences. These findings are discussed in relation to the phonological impairment explanation of dyslexia and to recent alternative explanations that posit an underlying impairment in automatizing skills which demand the fast execution of low-level cognitive processes.

The impact of orthographic consistency on dyslexia: A German-English comparison

We examined reading and phonological processing abilities in English and German dyslexic children, each compared with two control groups matched for reading level (8 years) and age (10-12 years). We hypothesised that the same underlying phonological processing deficit would exist in both language groups, but that there would be differences in the severity of written language impairments, due to differences in orthographic consistency. We also hypothesized that systematic differences due to orthographic consistency should be found equally for normal and dyslexic readers. All cross-language comparisons were based on a set of stimuli matched for meaning, pronunciation and spelling. The results supported both hypotheses: On a task challenging phonological processing skills (spoonerisms) both English and German dyslexics were significantly impaired compared to their age and reading age controls. However, there were extremely large differences in reading performance when English and German dyslexic children were compared. The evidence for systematic differences in reading performance due to differences in orthographic consistency was similar for normal and for dyslexic children, with English showing marked adverse effect on acquisition of reading skills.

Development of Word Reading Fluency and Spelling in a Consistent Orthography: An 8-Year Follow-Up

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and nonverbal IQ) were assessed at the beginning of Grade 1; reading fluency and spelling were tested at the end of Grade 1 as well as in Grades 4 and 8. Reading accuracy was close to ceiling in all reading assessments, such that reading fluency was not heavily influenced by differences in reading accuracy. High stability was observed for word reading fluency development. Of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1, 70% were still poor readers in Grade 8. For spelling, children who at the end of Grade 1 still had problems translating spoken words into phonologically plausible letter sequences developed problems with orthographic spelling later on. The strongest specific predictors were rapid automatized naming for reading fluency and phonological awareness for spelling. Word recognition speed was a relevant and highly stable indicator of reading skills and the only indicator that discriminated reading skill levels in consistent orthographies. Its long-term development was more strongly influenced by early naming speed than by phonological awareness.

Children's Understanding of Informational Access as Source of Knowledge.

WIMMER, HEINZ; HOGREFE, G.-JORGEN; and PERNER, JOSEF. Childrens Understanding of Informational Access as Source of Knowledge. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 386-396. A sharp improvement was found between 3 years and 5 years in childrens understanding of the role of visual perception and linguistic communication in knowledge formation. Although children at any age were able to obtain knowledge and could reliably introspect on the existence of knowledge obtained through visual and linguistic information, most 3and some 4-year-olds seemed completely ignorant about the causal connection between access to an informational source and resulting knowledge. They could not tell how they themselves had acquired a particular piece of knowledge (i.e., whether they had been shown or told). They were also incapable of assessing another persons knowledge of a fact on the basis of observing that person being deprived of or being given information about that fact.

The double-deficit hypothesis and difficulties in learning to read a regular orthography

In 2 large longitudinal studies, we selected 3 subgroups of German-speaking children (phonological awareness deficit, naming-speed deficit, double deficit) at the beginning of school and assessed reading and spelling performance about 3 years later. Quite different from findings with English-speaking children, phonological awareness deficits did not affect phonological coding in word recognition but did affect orthographic spelling and foreign-word reading. Naming-speed deficits did affect reading fluency, orthographic spelling, and foreign-word reading. Apparently, in the context of a regular orthography and a synthetic phonics teaching approach, early phases of literacy acquisition (particularly the acquisition of phonological coding) are less affected by early phonological awareness deficits than are later phases that depend on the build up of orthographic memory. The double-deficit hypothesis was developed by Maryanne Wolf and Patricia Bowers as an extension of the dominant phonological-deficit explanation of developmental dyslexia (e.g., Bowers & Wolf, 1993; Wolf & Bowers, 1999). The phonologicaldeficit hypothesis postulates an early difficulty in acquiring phonological awareness, which interferes with the acquisition of grapheme-phoneme coding as a word recognition mechanism, which in turn results in reduced self-teaching of orthographic word representations (Share, 1995). The early problem with phonological awareness is seen as resulting from less sharp phoneme boundaries in speech perception (Fowler, 1991) or from less distinct phonological word representations (Elbro & Peterson, 1998). The double-deficit hypothesis acknowledges the phonological awareness deficit of dyslexic children but stresses a deficit in naming speed as a second and equally important cause of reading difficulties. The first demonstration that dyslexic children show impaired naming speed was provided by Denckla and Rudel (1976), whose Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) Test became the standard assessment of naming speed. In the RAN test, a large array of repeatedly presented, well-known visual patterns (pictured objects, color patches, digits) has to be named as quickly as possible. Wolf, Bally, and Morris (1986) were the In:st to show that early differences in rapid naming are predictive of later reading difficulties. The double-deficit hypothesis is based on findings (reviewed by Wolf & Bowers, 1999) showing that, typically, there are only modest correlations between phonological awareness measures and RAN performance in groups of dyslexic children and that dyslexic children as a group exhibit both phonological awareness deficits and naming-speed deficits. From these findings,

The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: word recognition in English and German children

Groups of 7, 8, and 9-year-old children who were learning to read in English and German were given three different continuous reading tasks: a numeral reading task, a number word reading task, and a nonsense word reading task. The nonsense words could be read by analogy to the number words. Whereas reading time and error rates in numeral and number word reading were very similar across the two orthographies, the German children showed a big advantage in reading the nonsense words. This pattern of results is interpreted as evidence for the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition in the two orthographies. German children appear to rely on assembling pronunciations via grapheme-phoneme conversion, and English children appear to rely more on some kind of direct recognition strategy. A model of reading development that takes account of orthographic consistency is proposed.

Functional abnormalities in the dyslexic brain: A quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies

This study used foci from 17 original studies on functional abnormalities in the dyslexic brain to identify brain regions with consistent under‐ or overactivation. Studies were included when reading or reading‐related tasks were performed on visually presented stimuli and when results reported coordinates for group differences. Activation likelihood estimation (ALE) was used for quantification. Maxima of underactivation were found in inferior parietal, superior temporal, middle and inferior temporal, and fusiform regions of the left hemisphere. With respect to left frontal abnormalities, we found underactivation in the inferior frontal gyrus to be accompanied by overactivation in the primary motor cortex and the anterior insula. Tentative functional interpretations of the activation abnormalities are provided. Hum Brain Mapp, 2009.

Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development. The present study is an extension of Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) comparative study of reading development in young English and German children. The main finding of Wimmer and Goswami was that 7-, 8-, and 9-year old English children had substantially more difficulties in a pseudoword reading task than German children did. Landerl’s (2000) replication supported Wimmer and Goswami’s (1994) findings: in comparison to English children, young German readers in first and second grade displayed a distinct advantage in their ability to read pseudowords with a high degree of accuracy. Another recent replication with a comparison of Spanish and Portuguese children was reported by Defior, Martos, and Cary (2002). Their results show that the pseudoword reading accuracy of Spanish and Portuguese children is relatively similar to the performance of German children and much better than that reported for English children in the aforementioned studies.