Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this "Handbook," written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are…

Executive function (EF) skills are the attention-regulation skills that make it possible to sustain attention, keep goals and information in mind, refrain from responding immediately, resist distraction, tolerate frustration, consider the consequences of different behaviors, reflect on past experiences, and plan for the future. As EF research…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

The cognitive underpinnings of arithmetic calculation in children are noted to involve working memory; however, cognitive processes related to arithmetic calculation and working memory suggest that this relationship is more complex than stated previously. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relative contributions of processing…

Eight pianists with mild to moderate mental retardation and eight comparison pianists without retardation were asked to duplicate chord sequences of varying length and musical structure in an immediate memory format. All participants were sensitive to the structural dimensions of the material, and differences between groups were restricted to the…

A series of studies was conducted to determine whether children's reasoning is capacity-limited and whether any such capacity, if it exists, is based on the working memory system. An N-term series (transitive inference) was used as the primary task in an interference paradigm. A concurrent short-term memory load was employed as the secondary task.…

Comparison of 12 language disordered children (ages 7-13) with 12 normally achieving children on a short-term memory scanning task found the children with language disorders had substantially reduced processing speed as seen in longer memory retrieval time. The decreased memory scanning speed may contribute to linguistic deficits. (Author/DB)

Forty-eight children, either with or without a sensorineural hearing loss and either young (6 and 7 years old) or older (9 and 10 years old) reproduced sequences of acoustic stimuli that varied in number, temporal spacing, and type. Results suggested that the poorer performance of the hearing-impaired children was due to auditory processing…

Recent theories in cognitive psychology have emphasized the role of capacity requirements in encoding tasks. To examine the notion that age-related differences in the recall performance reflect differences in cognitive capacity, 80 adults (40 undergraduates, and 40 senior citizens) recalled newspaper advertisements under free recall and cued…

This study compared working memory in 28 high-functioning autistic individuals (ages 7-18) with that of 30 individuals with Tourette Syndrome or typically developing. No group differences were found. Performance was significantly correlated only with age and IQ. Results suggest that working memory is not an executive function seriously impaired in…

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

This study examined the short term recall of serially presented verbal information by 49 prelingually deafened and 39 hearing students (mean grade level 6). Findings suggest that neither discrepancy in the ordered short-term recall of verbal materials nor discrepancies in reading comprehension are directly assignable to differences in memory…

Studied was the development of a variety of grammatical-sensitivity and phonological skills in normally achieving, reading-disabled, arithmetic-disabled, and attention deficit disordered children 7 to 14 years old. (PCB)

The short-term verbal memory performance of 19 children and young adults with Down syndrome (DS) was contrasted with that of two control groups. Results confirm the expected verbal short-term memory deficit in DS subjects and suggest that this deficit is specific to memory for verbal information and is not primarily caused by auditory or…

Because visual short-term memory deficits are common in children with reading problems, a series of experiments were reviewed which examined the role of phonological processes in short-term memory. Results suggest that both developmental and individual differences in verbal memory span are related to efficient phonological processes. (Author/DB)