Aspects of the processing of frequency information were investigated in two studies. The first showed that second graders were as prepared to process frequency differences as adults. The second showed that practice at frequency counting does not improve the performance of young adults and neither does feedback regarding earlier performance.…

Reports on 5 experiments investigating the effect of blocking words according to semantic category on ordered recall in adults and young children. (Author/RM)

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half…

The nonword phonotactic frequency effect in verbal short-term memory (STM) is characterized by superior recall for nonwords containing familiar as opposed to less familiar phoneme associations. This effect is supposed to reflect the intervention of phonological long-term memory (LTM) in STM. However the lexical or sublexical nature of this LTM…

A theory of the components of verbal intelligence is developed and tested in this series of experiments. After reviewing alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding verbal intelligence, a componential theory of verbal comprehension is proposed. This theory specifies the information-processing components, context cues, and mediating…