Reports on research on the effect of various encoding and retrieval conditions on sentence recall. (AM)

Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated. The amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of passages were varied. Recall and recognition measures indicated students remembered more with instructions requiring processing at a semantic level.…

Three experiments were conducted to determine processes underlying age differences in the level of recall in a memory-span task. Five-year-olds recalled fewer items than adults in memory-span tasks involving both familiar and unfamiliar faces, even though the use of rehearsal and recoding strategies was minimized for adults. (MS)

Many theories of memory assume memory representations are abstract and exclude specific lexical information. Results of three experiments in this study suggest lexical information is present and persists in memory representations of meaning. A word-based theory of memory should be preferred over available theoretical alternatives. (CHK)

This study tested predictions from Clark and Haviland's formalization of what people do when integrating information. Subjects were presented with simple sentences issued from a set of complex ideas, and asked to reconstruct the complete ideas. Results support predictions based on a recoding strategy formalized by Clark and Haviland. (CHK)

The memory processes of 24 learning-disabled adolescents were compared to those of 13 nondisabled age-level and 13 nondisabled reading-level counterparts. Subjects performed similarly to reading-level peers on global recall measures, but actual processing was more similar to their age-level counterparts. (Author/JDD)

Results showed that children in delayed recall remembered more about an episode if they had experienced additional similar episodes. With increasing experience, children tended to confuse details. Kindergarteners were better able to report a repeated event than a singular event in temporal sequence. (RH)

Cognitive triage is the nonmonotonic relationship between the order in which children read words out of long-term memory and the strength of the memory of the words read. Two experiments with 7 and 12 year olds compared the fuzzy-trace theory with an effortful processing explanation. Findings consistently favored the fuzzy-trace theory's…

Comparison of 12 language disordered children (ages 7-13) with 12 normally achieving children on a short-term memory scanning task found the children with language disorders had substantially reduced processing speed as seen in longer memory retrieval time. The decreased memory scanning speed may contribute to linguistic deficits. (Author/DB)

Assessed sex differences in performance on the subtests of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children using more than 2,500 children ages 2-1/2 to 12-1/2 years old. Results confirmed previous research with female superiority on short-term memory tasks and male superiority on spatial-visualization skills. (Author/ABL)

Twenty preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to matched peers on counting abilities. SLI children demonstrated knowledge of rules associated with counting but exhibited marked difficulty in counting objects. They showed difficulty with rote counting, displayed a limited repertoire of number terms, miscounted…

Investigated whether children's recognition memory for movement in photographs is distorted forward in the direction of implied motion. When asked whether the second photograph was the same as or different from the first, subjects made more errors for test photographs showing the action slightly forward in time, compared with slightly backward in…

Fourteen children (ages 72-134 months) with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 with normal language completed a nonsense word repetition task and a sentence comprehension task. Results suggest that SLI children have diminished phonological working memory capacity and that this capacity deficit compromises their sentence comprehension…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 6-month-old infants with and without Down syndrome presented with a visual recognition memory task. The ERP morphology was the same for both groups. The chronometry of information processing by infants with Down syndrome was similar to or faster than "normal" infants' processing.…

Proposes a cognitive-based model for instructional design that addresses the acquisition and employment of knowledge, the interaction of content knowledge and cognitive strategies for higher order thinking skills, and the affective domain. Educational learning theory is discussed, including working memory, long-term memory, and cognitive skills.…