Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether extant language (lexical) knowledge or domain-general working memory is the better predictor of comprehension of object relative sentences for children with typical development. We hypothesized that extant language knowledge, not domain-general working memory, is the better predictor. Method:…

Within the context of complex cognitive processing and educational interventions, Woolfolk (2016) makes reference to problem solving acquisition, problem solving retention, and problem solving transfer. In each of the aforementioned types of problem solving activities, problem identification and problem representation (reflecting procedural…

Early prediction of student difficulty during long-duration learning activities allows a tutoring system to intervene by providing needed support, such as a hint, or by alerting an instructor. To be effective, these predictions must come early and be highly accurate, but such predictions are difficult for open-ended programming problems. In this…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

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…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

Working memory (WM) limitations are frequently reported for children with specific learning disorder (SLD). However, WM capacity influences more than literacy and numeracy, as research highlights the contribution of WM to language development, in particular syntax. In this article, the authors study the effect of syntactic intervention, i.e.…

This paper reports the findings of a study investigating the relationship of executive working memory (WM) and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) to fluency and self-repair behavior during an unrehearsed oral task performed by second language (L2) speakers of English at two levels of proficiency, elementary and lower intermediate. Correlational…

Background: Numerous studies, most of them involving adolescents and adults, have evidenced a moderate negative relationship between math anxiety and math performance. There are, however, a limited number of studies that have addressed the mechanisms underlying this relation. Aims: This study aimed to investigate the role of two possible…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…

Previous research has shown that there is a time cost (i.e., a resumption lag) associated with resuming a task following an interruption and that the longer the duration of the interruption, the greater the time cost (i.e., resumption lag increases as interruption duration increases). The memory-for-goals model (Altmann & Trafton, 2002)…

The "nothing-special" account of insight predicts positive correlations of insight problem solving and working memory capacity (WMC), whereas the "special-process" account expects no, or even negative, correlations. In the latter vein, DeCaro, Van Stockum Jr., and Wieth (2016) have recently reported weak negative WMC…

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…

Purpose: The present study examined whether engaging working memory in a secondary task benefits speech fluency. Effects of dual-task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and errors were examined with respect to predictions derived from three related theoretical accounts of disfluencies. Method: Nineteen adults who stutter and twenty adults who do…

By using the eye-tracking method, the present study explores whether working memory capacity assessed via the second language (L2) reading span (L2WMC) as well as the operational span task (OSPAN) affects the processing of subject-extraction and object-extraction in Chinese-English bilinguals. Results showed that L2WMC has no effects on the…