Describes a study designed to identify the mental operations that contribute to people's ability to answer wh- questions, that is, questions which request information that plays a particular role in relation to some action or event. Wh- questions are signaled by interrogative pronouns and adverbs like who, what, when, and where. (SED)

A review of the concepts of short-term memory and working memory in contemporary cognitive psychology is applied to current research in language processing and language impairments. Unresolved theoretical issues are identified, including the role of speech production in short-term memory, the role of knowledge retrieval in short-term recall, the…

This article examines the construct of working memory and its relationship to sentence comprehension difficulties of children with specific language impairment. Some sentence comprehension problems of these children may be related to inefficient management of working memory resources. Techniques for assessing working memory and enhancing the…

Discrimination and phonetic identification abilities of children (ages 5-6) with language impairments were compared to those of normally developing 4-year-olds and previous findings on children and adults. Results support hypotheses suggesting disorders in the phonological component of working memory in children with language impairments and the…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

Describes a study of whether dysarthric patients who have lost the ability to speak as a result of brain damage, but whose language is intact, show incidence of phonological coding and "inner speech." Concludes that phonological coding and subvocal rehearsal cab operate without feedback from the peripheral speech musculature. (SED)

The observation of a syllable frequency effect in naming latencies has been an argument in favor of a functional role of stored syllables in speech production. Accordingly, various theoretical models postulate that a repository of syllable representations is accessed during phonetic encoding. However, the direct empirical evidence for locating the…

Objective: Executive dysfunction in ADHD is well supported. However, recent studies suggest that more fundamental impairments may be contributing. We assessed brain function in adults with ADHD during simple and complex forms of processing. Method: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging with forward and backward digit spans to investigate…

This study employed structural equation modeling to examine the effects of Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) abilities on reading decoding skills using five age-differentiated subsamples from the standardization sample of the Woodcock-Johnson III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). Using the Spearman Model including only g, strong direct effects of g on…

All beginners at simultaneous interpreting falter at the flow of oral language, unaware that their short-term semantic flow of oral language, unaware that his short-term semantic memory can be managed more efficiently if used to store units of meaning rather than discrete words. Beginners must learn to listen for sense from the start and focus…

Compared two-month old's abilities to detect changes in word order for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus two unrelated, but well-formed, sentence fragments. Results suggest that infants are able to remember the order of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosodic structure of a single well-formed sentence. (HTH)

Five experiments examined the extent and nature of the referential source errors of 5- to 10-year-old children who listened to stories containing a referential utterance. The results supported five conclusions about children's confusion of different sources of information in referential communication. (SW)

In line with the original presentation of nonword repetition as a measure of phonological short-term memory (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989), the theoretical account Gathercole (2006) puts forward in her Keynote Article focuses on phonological storage as the key capacity common to nonword repetition and vocabulary acquisition. However, evidence that…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…