The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these…

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…

Study examined transfer of learners' first language (L1) orthographic processing strategies to second language processing. Two groups learning Japanese, differing by L1 writing system (phonographic vs. morphographic), were tested on ability to represent novel kanji characters in short-term memory. Results indicate learners with a morphographic L1…

In this study, the author elucidated whether reading experience continues to contribute to word recognition skills in readers with well-internalized reading skills. The participants performed consecutive same or different judgments regarding the identicalness of letters, words, and pseudohomophones. For a more detailed examination of how increased…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension, namely the ability to comprehend implied meaning in spoken dialogues, in terms of accuracy and speed of comprehension. Participants included 46 native English speakers at a U.S. university and 160 Japanese students of English in a college in Japan who…

The "levels effect," the finding that the more central to the meaning of a passage an idea is the more likely that idea is to be retained, does not seem to hold for immediate recognition. Therefore, a study was conducted to test a model of information storage that predicted that when surface structure information was preserved in its…

This paper reports two studies that investigate differences in comprehension monitoring skills between good and poor comprehenders. Two groups of 9- to 10-year-olds, who were matched for reading vocabulary and word recognition skills but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. In the first study, in which the children were required to…

This study examined the development of metaprocessing abilities in children with varying degrees of language abilities and sought to determine if the patterns of metaprocessing development that emerged were similar for these ability groups. Subjects were 141 children ages 4-5 at the beginning of the study, divided into a control group, a low…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

Understanding a text requires more than the ability to read individual words: it depends greatly on vocabulary knowledge. This important book brings together leading literacy scholars to synthesize cutting-edge research on vocabulary development and its connections to reading comprehension. The volume also reviews an array of approaches to…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…

Background: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. Aims: To examine the effect…

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory…

Nineteen moderately/severely retarded students (ages 9-22) completed ten 15-minute computer-assisted instruction sessions and seven basic cognitive tasks measuring simple learning, choice reaction time, relearning, probed recall, stimulus discrimination, tachictoscopic threshold, and recognition memory. Stimulus discrimination, probed recall, and…

This paper investigates the processes by which visual mental images--the precept-like short-term memory representations--are created from information stored in long-term memory. It also presents a new method for studying image generation. Three experiments were conducted using college students as subjects. In the first experiment, a Podgorny and…