How does prior linguistic knowledge modulate learning in verbal auditory statistical learning (SL) tasks? Here, we address this question by assessing to what extent the frequency of syllabic co-occurrences in the learners' native language determines SL performance. We computed the frequency of co-occurrences of syllables in spoken Spanish through…

Task solving processes and changes in these processes have long been expected to provide valuable information about children's performance in school. This article used electronic tangibles (concrete materials that can be physically manipulated) and a dynamic testing format (pretest, training, and posttest) to investigate children's task solving…

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.…

Background: In the last decades, children's understanding of mathematical principles has become an important research topic. Different from the commutativity and inversion principles, only few studies have focused on children's understanding of the addition/subtraction complement principle (if a - b = c, then c + b = a), mainly relying on verbal…

Research on problem solving typically does not address tasks that involve following detailed and/or illustrated step-by-step instructions. Such tasks are not seen as cognitively challenging problems to be solved. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by analyzing verbal protocols collected during an Origami folding task. Participants…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

The present study aimed at modeling individual differences in a verbal learning task by means of a latent structured growth curve approach based on an exponential function that yielded 3 parameters: initial recall, learning rate, and asymptotic performance. Three cognitive variables--speed of information processing, verbal knowledge, working…

Purpose: This study was designed to explore the behavioral nature of pragmatic impairment following severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and to evaluate the contribution of executive skills to the experience of pragmatic difficulties after TBI. Method: Participants were grouped into 43 TBI dyads (TBI adults and close relatives) and 43 control…

Analogical reasoning--perceiving similarities in different situations and the transfer of such information--facilitates learning and understanding. However, children with learning disabilities (LD) typically demonstrate deficits in such information processing strategies. In this study, we investigated the analogical problem-solving differences…

We report five cases with caudate infarction due to Heubner's recurring artery occlusion, in which we conducted detailed memory examinations in terms of explicit memory and implicit memory. We performed the auditory verbal learning test as explicit memory tasks, and motor and cognitive procedural memory tasks, developed by Komori, as implicit…

Twenty 3-year-old, home reared, Down's Syndrome children and eight 3-year-old normal children were studied to examine the verbal learning characteristics of Down's Syndrome children in typical preschool learning tasks. Prior to the study, research on characteristics of verbal learning deficits in retarded individuals and on verbal skill training…

Verbal sequence training was used to teach a moderately mentally retarded woman to sequence job-related tasks. Learning to say the tasks in the proper sequence resulted in the employee performing her tasks in that sequence, and the employee was capable of mediating her own work behavior when scheduled changes occurred. (Author/JDD)

Discusses three steps in learning-strategy analysis--determining the potential errors, categorizing them as being verbal or motor, and identifying appropriate training objectives, learning strategies, and teaching objectives. Then follow descriptions of concept and principle learning, motor performance, and motor chain learning. The task analyzed…

The nonword phonotactic frequency effect in verbal short-term memory (STM) is characterized by superior recall for nonwords containing familiar as opposed to less familiar phoneme associations. This effect is supposed to reflect the intervention of phonological long-term memory (LTM) in STM. However the lexical or sublexical nature of this LTM…

The study sought to use Jensen's two-level theory of mental abilities to predict some hitherto unknown or unnoticed phenomena--facts about which the theory should yield clear-cut predictions and which are not as clearly predictable from other theories, though they may receive ad hoc explanations after the fact. From the two-level theory of mental…