Papers by Caroline Castel
Frontiers in Psychology, 2013
The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between finger counting and nume... more The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between finger counting and numerical processing in 4-7-year-old children. Children were assessed on a variety of numerical tasks and we examined the correlations between their rates of success and their frequency of finger use in a counting task. We showed that children's performance on finger pattern comparison and identification tasks did not correlate with the frequency of finger use. However, this last variable correlated with the percentages of correct responses in an enumeration task (i.e., GiveN task), even when the age of children was entered as a covariate in the analysis. Despite this correlation, we showed that some children who never used their fingers in the counting task were able to perform optimally in the enumeration task. Overall, our results support the conclusion that finger counting is useful but not necessary to develop accurate symbolic numerical skills. Moreover, our results suggest that the use of fingers in a counting task is related to the ability of children in a dynamic enumeration task but not to static tasks involving recognition or comparison of finger patterns. Therefore, it could be that the link between fingers and numbers remain circumscribed to counting tasks and do not extent to static finger montring situations.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2011
This paper addresses the relationship between basic numerical processes and higher level numerica... more This paper addresses the relationship between basic numerical processes and higher level numerical abilities in normal achieving adults. In the first experiment we inferred the elementary numerical abilities of university students from the time they needed to encode numerical information involved in complex additions and subtractions. We interpreted the shorter encoding times in good arithmetic problem solvers as revealing clearer or more accessible representations of numbers. The second experiment shows that these results cannot be due to the fact that lower skilled individuals experience more maths anxiety or put more cognitive efforts into calculations than do higher skilled individuals. Moreover, the third experiment involving non-numerical information supports the hypothesis that these interindividual differences are specific to number processing. The possible causal relationships between basic and higher level numerical abilities are discussed.
Retrieval from Memory or Procedural Strategies for Addition Problems: The Use of the Operand-Recognition Paradigm in 10YearOld Children
Swiss Journal of Psychology, 2011
In this study, we used a paradigm recently developed (Thevenot, Fanget, &... more In this study, we used a paradigm recently developed (Thevenot, Fanget, & Fayol, 2007) to determine whether 10-year-old children solve simple addition problems by retrieval of the answer from long-term memory or by calculation procedures. Our paradigm is unique in that it does not rely on reaction times or verbal reports, which are known to potentially bias the results, especially
Mental Subtraction in High and Lower Skilled Arithmetic Problem Solvers: Verbal Report Versus Operand-Recognition Paradigms
Journal of Experimental Psychology-learning Memory and Cognition, 2010
The authors used the operand-recognition paradigm (C. Thevenot, M. Fanget, &a... more The authors used the operand-recognition paradigm (C. Thevenot, M. Fanget, & M. Fayol, 2007) in order to study the strategies used by adults to solve subtraction problems. This paradigm capitalizes on the fact that algorithmic procedures degrade the memory traces of the operands. Therefore, greater difficulty in recognizing them is expected when calculations have been solved by reconstructive strategies rather than by retrieval of number facts from long-term memory. The present results suggest that low- and high-skilled individuals differ in their strategy when they solve problems involving minuends from 11 to 18. Whereas high-skilled individuals retrieve the results of such subtractions from long-term memory, lower skilled individuals have to resort to reconstructive strategies. Moreover, the authors directly confront the results obtained with the operand-recognition paradigm and those obtained with the more classical method of verbal report collection and show clearly that this second method of investigation fails to reveal this differential pattern. The rationale behind the operand-recognition paradigm is then discussed.
Lien entre dénomination rapide et lecture chez les enfants dyslexiques
Annee Psychologique, 2008
RÉSUMÉ Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre le lien entre dénomination rapide (RAN ou Rapid Automa... more RÉSUMÉ Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre le lien entre dénomination rapide (RAN ou Rapid Automatized Naming) et lecture. Une expérience a été réalisée auprès d'enfants dyslexiques, dans laquelle nous avons comparé deux versions du RAN : une version ...
Cognition, 2007
The language production system of literate adults comprises an orthographic system (used during w... more The language production system of literate adults comprises an orthographic system (used during written language production) and a phonological system (used during spoken language production). Recent psycholinguistic research has investigated possible influences of the orthographic system on the phonological system. This research has produced contrastive results, with some studies showing effects of orthography in the course of normal speech production while others failing to show such effects. In this article, we review the available evidence and consider possible explanations for the discrepancy. We then report two form-preparation experiments which aimed at testing for the effects of orthography in spoken word-production. Our results provide clear evidence that the orthographic properties of the words do not influence their spoken production in picture naming. We discuss this finding in relation to psycholinguistic and neuropsychological investigations of the relationship between written and spoken word-production.
Cognition, 2008
Developmental dyslexia was investigated within a well-understood and fully specified computationa... more Developmental dyslexia was investigated within a well-understood and fully specified computational model of reading aloud: the dual route cascaded model (DRC [Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J.C. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108,). Four tasks were designed to assess each representational level of the DRC: letter level, orthographic lexicon, phonological lexicon, and phoneme system. The data showed no single cause of dyslexia, but rather a complex pattern of phonological, phonemic, and letter processing deficits. Importantly, most dyslexics had deficits in more than one domain. Subtyping analyses also suggested that both the phonological and surface dyslexics almost always had more than a single underlying deficit. To simulate the reading performance for each individual with the DRC, we added 0010-0277/$ -see front matter Ó
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Papers by Caroline Castel