This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

Although there is a growing research base on Arabic literacy development to inform our understanding of the factors that account for variability in word reading skill, the current body of research is limited by two major constraints. First, although several studies examine one or more early literacy constructs, we were able to locate only two…

Moving the hands or chewing in the encoding stage enhances memory, because body movement activates the frontal cortex, which is crucial to the memory process. However, how hand movement facilitates word memory in an applied setting and whether it produces long-term effects remain unclear. Grade 1 students studied 15 new words through different…

Purpose: The current study compared the effects of direct instruction versus indirect exposure on multiple aspects of novel word learning for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language development (TLD). Method: Participants included 36 children with DLD and 45 children with TLD. All children were in the…

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

We examined the role of different cognitive skills in word reading (accuracy and fluency) and spelling accuracy in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Japanese Hiragana and Kanji are strikingly contrastive orthographies: Hiragana has consistent character-sound correspondences with a limited symbol set, whereas Kanji has inconsistent…

As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques -- such as rehearsal and organizational strategies -- for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these…

Building on longitudinal findings of linkages between aspects of teachers' language during instruction and children's use of mnemonic strategies, this investigation was designed to examine experimentally the impact of instruction on memory development. First and second graders ("N" = 54, "M"[subscript age] = 7 years)…

Change in strategies is often mentioned as a source of memory development. However, though performance in working memory tasks steadily improves during childhood, theories differ in linking this development to strategy changes. Whereas some theories, such as the time-based resource-sharing model, invoke the age-related increase in use and…

The authors examined an activity-based listening strategy with first- and third-grade children in mixed-grade dyads. On the basis of theories of cognitive development and previous research, the authors predicted the following: (a) children in an activity-based strategy would recall more story events compared with those in a repetition strategy and…

This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the…

Kreutzer et al.'s (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40(1):1-60, 1975) metamemory interview has been widely used in children's metamemory literature, yet the psychometric properties of the measure have yet to be reported, and the format and language of some subtests may pose problems for young children. Researchers often…

The authors examined (a) the extent to which kindergarten estimates of core language functions predicted teacher ratings of behavior problems in each of the child's first 4 years of elementary school and (b) the ability of core language measures to predict concurrent behavior problems at each of the early elementary school grades studied.…

This study determined the degree to which the phonological and executive components of memory reflect language-specific capacities in Spanish and English vocabulary. We tested whether the memory processes in a sample of English language learners found in Grade 1 also emerged in Grade 2. For the total sample (N=90), Grade 1 English STM measures…