"Purpose:" ASD is associated with relative strengths in the visuospatial domain but varying abilities in the linguistic domain. Previous studies suggest parallels between spatial language and spatial cognition in older autistic individuals, but no research to date has examined this relationship in young autistic children. Therefore, the…

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question--intensely discussed for more than two decades in educational, psychological, and psycholinguistic research in terms of "modality effect in multimedia learning," "split-attention effect," or…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

The association between a word and typical location (e.g., cloud-up) appears to modulate healthy individuals' response times and visual attention. This study examined whether similar effects can be observed in a clinical population characterized by difficulties in both spatial representation and lexical processing. In an eye-tracking experiment,…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

As a basic indicator of verbal ability, verbal fluency refers to the degree of fluency in the use of language to convey information. The different components of working memory play an important role in verbal fluency. The inhibiting control mechanism takes place during L2 production processing in bilinguals, which may affect their verbal fluency…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…

A number of new psycholinguistic variables has been proposed during the last years within embodied cognition framework: modality experience rating (i.e., relationship between words and images of a particular perceptive modality--visual, auditory, haptic etc.), manipulability (the necessity for an object to interact with human hands in order to…

The testing effect, defined as the positive effect of "retrieval practice" (i.e., self-testing) on long-term memory retention relative to other ways to support learning, is a robust empirical phenomenon. Despite substantial scientific evidence for the testing effect, less is known about its effectiveness in relation to individual…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is defined by persistent difficulties with language, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it is also associated with domain-general and nonverbal information-processing deficits. However, the interconnections between cognitive functions, both nonverbal and language related, are still unclear.…

This study investigated the relationship between balanced multilingualism and working memory. Specifically, it reports on the relationship between balanced proficiency in speaking, reading and comprehension (across three languages), and verbal and visuospatial working memory in young South African adults. Information about participants' language…

Purpose: On the basis of Baddeley's working memory model (1986), we examined working memory functioning in children with learning disorders with and without specific language impairment (SLI). We pursued the question whether children with learning disorders exhibit similar working memory deficits as children with additional SLI. Method: In…

A comprehensive investigation of the neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of children with autism may help to better describe their cognitive abilities and to design appropriate interventions. To this end we compared the NEPSY-II profiles of 22 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) with those of 44 healthy control…

Previous dual-task research pairing complex visual tasks involving non-spatial cognitive processes during dichotic listening have shown effects on the late component (Ndl) of the negative difference selective attention waveform but no effects on the early (Nde) response suggesting that the Ndl, but not the Nde, is affected by non-spatial…