Visual working memory (VWM) has a limited capacity of approximately 3-4 visual objects. Current theories of VWM propose that a limited pool of resources can be flexibly allocated to objects, allowing them to be represented at varying levels of precision. Factors that influence the allocation of these resources, such as the complexity and…

The construct autobiographical memory (AM) refers to the mnemonic skill that enables individuals to form personal memories about their lives and re-experience them. Its ontogeny can be understood from the dialectic construction of maturational processes and the cultural-historical context. This research sought to further the knowledge regarding…

This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

Little is known about implicit morphological processing in typical and atypical readers. These studies investigate this using a probe detection task with lures sharing morphological, orthographic, or semantic overlap with the probe. Intermediate and advanced readers (reading ages = 9;1-12;9) perform more poorly when there is more linguistic…

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was…

Purpose: Classifying children into two language ability groups, with and without language impairment, may underestimate the number of groups with distinct language ability patterns, or, alternatively, there may be only a single group characterized by a continuum of language performance. The purpose of the current study was to identify the number…

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L[subscript 1]) and second language (L[subscript 2]) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of…

The advantage for real words over nonwords in serial recall--the "lexicality effect"--is typically attributed to support for item-level phonology, either via redintegration, whereby partially degraded short-term traces are "cleaned up" via support from long-term representations of the phonological material or via the more…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

We investigated the sustained effects of explicit versus implicit instruction on the breadth and depth of children's vocabularies, while taking their general vocabulary and verbal short-term memory into account. Two experimental groups with 12 and 15 kindergarten children respectively learned two sets of 17 words counterbalanced to be taught first…

Research on dyslexia has largely centred on reading. The aim of this study was to assess the writing of 13 children with and 28 without dyslexia at age 11?years. A programme for keystroke logging was used to allow recording of typing activity as the children performed a sentence dictation task. Five sentences were read aloud twice each. The task…

Two experiments compared the effects of depth of processing on working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM) using a levels-of-processing (LOP) span task, a newly developed WM span procedure that involves processing to-be-remembered words based on their visual, phonological, or semantic characteristics. Depth of processing had minimal effect on…

Although phonological representations have been a primary focus of verbal working memory research, lexical-semantic manipulations also influence performance. In the present study, the authors investigated whether a classic phenomenon in verbal working memory, the phonological similarity effect (PSE), is modulated by a lexical-semantic variable,…