A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…

A very basic feature of learning is the translation of what is heard or seen into a form that can be sotred in memore. This process of translation will be considered in relation to reception and as a possible cause of differences in learning performance. (Author)

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Presents a review of various studies on the acquisition, nature, and function of language coding in children's learning. (TO)

Sentences written in either an expanded or optionally deleted form were read for imitation and delayed recall to a group of nursery school children and a group of adults. Results and their implications are discussed. (Author/RM)

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7, and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. (Author/SW)

The relationship between socioeconomic status and both recognition and recall vocabularies of upper elementary school children was studied. (CK)

A study is made of ways in which three children forgot a foreign language in which they had been immersed. Specifically considered are whether the last things learned are the first things forgotten, and whether forgetting entails unlearning in reverse order from the original learning process. (Author/RM)

A Sample of 576 children participated in a study to determine the manner in which children retain narrative material, what information they retain, and the effects of sex and age upon these aspects of memory. The children, ranging in age from six to eight years, listened to a tape recorded story in individual sessions. Half of them were asked to…

The purpose of this research was to assess the validity of recent claims that experimenter-provided pictures facilitate young children's oral prose learning. The major question of interest was whether the pictures do nothing more than prompt the child to process the just presented information one more time, Three experiments were designed to test…

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of nonbizarre vs. bizarre pictorial elaboration on the paired-associate retention of noun pairs. Five and seven year old children served as subjects in the first two experiments and learned a list of common noun pairs by the study-test paired-associate method. Experiment 1 provided a…

The present study was conducted in order to evaluate pictorial elaboration effects in children's incidental paired-associate memory. The design of the experiment consisted of a 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 factorial with (1) grade level (kindergarten vs. second), (2) pictorial presentation (standard vs. elaborated), (3) list (two 14-pair lists of common noun…