To date, only a few studies with randomized controlled trials have been published on the effectiveness of phonics-based reading interventions to teach decoding and spelling skills to students with intellectual disability. This study evaluated the effects of a phonics-based reading intervention program on the progress of French-speaking elementary students with intellectual disability. A total of 48 non decoding elementary students with intellectual disability were randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a control group. Most of the participants (75 %) had nonverbal IQs below 55. The reading intervention program was implemented for seven months by the students' teachers and mainly in a small-group format (two to four students). Students from the treatment group made significantly more progress in word and nonword reading measured by a researcher-designed test with a medium effect size. An almost significant difference was also found on spelling (p = .058) and on word and nonword reading measured with a standardized test (p = .060) with medium effect sizes. These findings suggest that students with ID benefit from phonics-based programs integrating research-based approaches and techniques.

This paper describes data from de Chambrier et al. (2023). The dataset [2] contains raw eye tracking data of 36 healthy adults, collected using an EyeLink 1000 (SR Research Ltd., ON, Canada) during an on-screen reading task. Participants read 96 items including words, pseudowords and numerals. Each item was presented at the center of the screen until the participant produced an oral response and pressed the keyboard's space bar.

Finger counting can be useful in solving arithmetic problems, noticeably because it reduces the working memory demand of mental calculations. However, proprioceptive information might not be sufficient to keep track of the number of fingers raised during problem solving, and visual input may play an important role in this process. The present study was designed to address this question and shows that 8-year-old children look at their fingers in 60% of the trials during finger counting when solving additive problems. Moreover, our results reveal that the frequency of finger looking is negatively correlated with working memory capacities and is higher for more difficult problems. These findings suggest that finger looking is recruited in managing the cognitive demand of the arithmetic task, probably by providing additional external cues to monitor the number of steps that have to be incremented during finger counting.

A deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), acknowledged to be linked to dyslexia, has rarely been investigated as a potential explanation of the reading difficulties that children with intellectual disability (ID) often face. The existing studies mainly focused on adolescent or adults with ID matched to typically developing (TD) children on verbal mental age, or used a single RAN task. The aim of this study was to compare the RAN pattern and skills of children with ID and low reading skills to the ones of TD children with matched reading skills. 30 children with mild to moderate ID with mixed etiology (M = 9.4 years-old) were pair-matched to 30 TD children (M = 4.3 years-old) on phonological awareness- and reading-level. They were all administered color, object, finger, and vowel RAN tasks. Results showed that children with ID had more domain-specific RAN skills and were largely slower in most of the RAN tasks than their younger TD peers. This suggests that a deficit in RAN should be added to the explanations of their frequent reading difficulties, which might open new remediation possibilities.