This study investigated developmental memory capacity through picture span and feature binding. Participants included third grade students and college age adults with typical development. Picture span was used to assess working memory capacity when participants were asked to identify, locate, and sequence common visual-graphic symbols from…

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether…

The purpose of this study was to examine what components of executive function (EF)--inhibition, shifting and updating/working memory--predict reading comprehension in young adults. Ninety university students (65 females, 25 males; mean age = 21.82 years) were assessed on shifting (Planned Connections and Colour/Shape Shifting), inhibition…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…

Purpose: Previous studies have reported that children with specific language impairment (SLI) name pictures more slowly than do chronological age-matched (CAM) peers. Rapid naming depends on 2 factors known to be problematic for children with SLI--lexical retrieval and nonlinguistic speed of processing. Although all studies implicate a…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…