Proofreading one's own writing is difficult due to the overfamiliarity of one's writing, which has been claimed to conceal errors, even extraneous errors inserted by someone else (as in collaborative writing). In the present research, we examined whether increasing one's familiarity with text can indeed have a negative influence on error…

Spelling is a subject that often opens a chasm between "haves" and "have-nots". Students with spelling power, the haves, pick up new spellings almost effortlessly, acing their spelling tests after a few minutes of review. In contrast, the have-nots may painstakingly copy out each word 10 times the night before the test and still fail the test the…

Previous research has established the relevance of working memory for cognitive development. Yet the factors responsible for shaping performance in the complex span tasks used to assess working memory capacity are not fully understood. We report a study of reading span in 7- to 11-year-old children that addresses several contemporary theoretical…

The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple…

As a group, participants with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are impaired in academic performance and learning. This may be due to a mild intellectual impairment, impaired attention, or inability to allocate sufficient effort. If the latter is the case, this should be evident in the learning strategies applied. Four indices of…

Using a procedure of Hay and Jacoby [Hay, J. F., & Jacoby, L. L. (1999). "Separating habit and recollection in young and older adults: Effects of elaborative processing and distinctiveness." "Psychology and Aging," 14, 122-134], Korsakoff patients' capacity to encode and retrieve elaborative, semantic information was investigated. Habits were…

Four new military training systems offer the opportunity for the application of cognitive science. They are the following: (1) a family of memorization games; (2) a simulator with a graphic, schematic student interface; (3) a system for solving problems of relative motion; and (4) a method of building cognitive skills for air-intercept control.…

This study investigated taxonomic clustering and use of frequency associations as features in the semantic memory of children (n=30 in grades two and six) with learning disabilities (LD). Results suggested that, when individual child-generated word lists (i.e., meaningful) are used, children with LD may not be impaired in their ability to utilize…

The Bransford and Franks paradigm for the study of semantic integration is called into question. Three experiments are described that test the hypothesis that this paradigm produces its results by creating confusion and interference. The results call for continued search for a paradigm relative to the study of integration. (AMH)

Two hundred sixty-five subjects learned a mixed list of paired associates in an AB, AD and AB, CD transfer paradigm. Two levels of semantic processing were factorially varied across original and interpolated pairs. Recall of original pairs was shown to be directly related to the processing depth of original pairs in both paradigms and inversely…

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…

Discusses three experiments designed to examine the problem of the internal representation of meaning of a verbal stimulus. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

A total of 160 second-grade children were assigned on the basis of a free-recall pretest to four instructional conditions and were given a series of lists of pictures for free recall. Results focused on different levels of recall displayed by experimental and control groups. (Author/CI)

This study investigates how different encoding strategies affect retention of Chinese characters (words) as measured by recall of the sound and meaning of the characters. Three types of encoding strategies were investigated during character learning: rote memorisation (shallow processing), student self-generated elaboration, and instructor-guided…

This study is an attempt to investigate the usefulness of imagery instructions in learning PA nouns embedded in sentences and conjunction phrases with three different age groups (third grade, sixth grade and college students). In addition, six different item types are employed to convey increasingly dissimilar contexts from study to test trials.…