Although motivation and cognition are often examined separately, recent theory suggests that a delay-averse motivational style may negatively impact development of executive functions (EFs), such as working memory (WM) and response inhibition (RI) for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; Sonuga-Barke, 2002). This model…

The nature of the childhood development of immediate recall has been difficult to determine. There could be a developmental increase in either the number of chunks held in working memory or the use of grouping to make the most of a constant capacity. In 3 experiments with children in the early elementary school years and adults, we show that…

This article presents a review of the "Process Assessment of the Learner-Second Edition" (PAL-II), an individual or group-administered instrument designed to assess the cognitive processes involved in academic tasks in kindergarten through sixth grade. The instrument allows the examiner to identify reasons for underachievement and…

A series of studies was conducted to determine whether children's reasoning is capacity-limited and whether any such capacity, if it exists, is based on the working memory system. An N-term series (transitive inference) was used as the primary task in an interference paradigm. A concurrent short-term memory load was employed as the secondary task.…

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)

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

This study sought to determine whether categorizing information would increase students' ability to recall that information. Two recall tests, consisting of a list of 30 words in random order and a list of the same 30 words grouped into 6 categories, was developed and administered to 2 groups of 16 fourth- and fifth-grade students enrolled in a…

Four experiments with children aged 5 through 12 tested the relationship between short-term memory (STM) and processing capacity. The results suggest that effects obtained with STM span do not provide clear indications of overall working memory development, because STM span and the processing space component of working memory entail distinct…

Nine experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that short-term memory and information processing share a common pool of scarce resources. (LMO)

Explored the contribution of two working memory systems, the articulatory loop and the central executive, and short-term memory to the word recognition and comprehension deficits of children with learning disabilities. Results of 2 experiments with 150 children support the idea that poor word recognition and comprehension reflect deficits in a…

Sixteen school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 16 age-matched controls were tested for immediate recall of digits presented visually, auditorily, or audiovisually. Recall tasks compared speaking and pointing response modalities. SLI children showed small recency effects as well as an unusually poor recall when visually…

The hypothesis that gains in reading performance occurring among dyslexic children during individually paced reading are partially attributable to changes in short-term memory processing was tested with 23 elementary school students. Findings provide support for a causal role for short-term memory functioning in text processing. (SLD)

Established the differential maturation of rapid-speaking durations and the durations of interword pauses in the memory-span-task responses of first, third and fifth graders. Found that a particular memory span is accompanied by different profiles of processing rates in children of different ages. (Author)

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

Analyses compared serial memory, verbal learning, and abstract visual-spatial memory performance of 45 children (ages 9-12) with reading disabilities (RD) to chronological-age- (CA) and reading-level- (RL) matched controls. Phonological deficit and dual route comparisons indicate children with RD performed more poorly than CA-matched and better…