It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

Background: According to Munsat (1965, The concept of memory. University of Michigan), a person who makes frequent prospective memory (PM) errors is considered as having a flawed character rather than a bad memory. Given that PM completes its development only in young adulthood, this bias might occur not only within social relationships but also…

Background: Knowledge of the discourse performance of non-brain-damaged individuals is critical not only for its differentiation from disordered expression but also for more accurate models of ageing and communication. The effect of ageing and cognitive skills on the cohesive adequacy of discourse has, until now, presented a confusing and…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster…

Background: Swahili is widely spoken in East Africa, but to date there are no culturally and linguistically appropriate materials available for speech-language therapists working in the region. The challenges are further exacerbated by the limited research available on the typical acquisition of Swahili phonology. Aim: To describe the speech…

Working memory (WM) as the ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate various kinds of information is known to be affected by proactive interference (PI) from previously relevant contents, but studies on developmental changes in the susceptibility to PI are scarce. In the present study, we investigated life span development of item-specific…

This study investigated whether Foygel and Dell's (2000) interactive two-step model of speech production could simulate the number and type of errors made in picture-naming by 68 children of elementary-school age. Results showed that the model provided a satisfactory simulation of the mean error profile of children aged five, six, seven, eight and…

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children's language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures. In…

As part of a series of studies dealing with varieties of interference in sentence learning as assessed by multiple choice tests, a study was undertaken to explore the effects of pictures on inferentially produced interference in recognition memory for sentence information. The subjects were 104 first grade students and 104 fourth, fifth, and sixth…