There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain…

Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

Despite the known roles of working memory and background knowledge in the process of reading comprehension, few attempts have been made to elucidate the interaction between these two individual difference factors in second language (L2) reading comprehension. The current study investigated whether and how working memory and background knowledge…

Parent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and caregiver reports of harsh parenting were examined in relation to the executive function (EF) abilities in young low-income children. Data were collected from 55 "mother-child" dyads; 17-40 months of age. Parent measures included the ACEs questionnaire and harsh parenting items from the…

Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., precategorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the postcategorical properties (e.g., phonology,…

Purpose: The aims of this study were to examine phonological short-term memory in children born preterm (PT) and to explore relations between this neuropsychological process and later language skills. Method: Children born PT (n = 74) and full term (FT; n = 60) participated in a nonword repetition (NWR) task at 36 months old. Standardized measures…

A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7-8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

Response inhibition is crucial for mental and physical health but studies assessing the trainability of this type of inhibition are rare. Thirty-nine children aged 10-12 years and 46 adults aged 18-24 years were assigned to an adaptive go/no-go inhibition training condition or an active control condition. Transfer of training effects to…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in forming relations among items and context. This capacity for relational binding is also involved in spatial navigation and research on this topic in ASD is scarce and inconclusive. Using a computerised version of the Morris Water Maze task, ASD participants showed particular…