Investigated the relationship between grammatical knowledge and reading ability in third grade good and poor readers. Two aspects of grammar--binding and control--were assessed to determine whether poor readers had syntactic deficits. Interpretations were assessed through a sentence-picture matching task in which picture depictions of all possible…

This research was aimed at contributing to the current understanding of the underlying factors of naming speed and the causes of naming speed deficits. Forty regular readers and 40 dyslexic university students participated in the study. Electrophysiological (Event-Related Potentials [ERPs]) and behavioral measures were employed. Behavioral…

Mental state language during conversations about the past was assessed in a short-term longitudinal study. Twenty-one mother-child dyads discussed several previously experienced events when the children were 30 and 42 months old. Over time, children's mental term use--although quite low--did increase, and both mothers and children talked more…

This study adds to the growing literature linking children's experiences in the environment to individual differences in their developing skills in attention, memory, and planning. The authors asked about the extent to which stimulating and sensitive care in the family and in the child-care or school environments would predict these cognitive…

Children with Specific language Impairment (SLI) have problems with verbal memory, particularly with tasks that have more processing demands. They also have slower speeds of responding for some tasks. To identify the extent to which young children with SLI would differ in performance from age-matched non-impaired children on a set of spatio-visual…

This paper investigates mathematical skills in Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a pathological condition because of congenital alterations of chromosome pair 15. The following questions were addressed: (1) Are mathematical skills in PWS relatively more impaired with respect to other cognitive functions (as has been repeatedly but anecdotally…

Thirty-one 8- and 9-year-old children selected for dyscalculia, reading difficulties or both, were compared to controls on a range of basic number processing tasks. Children with dyscalculia only had impaired performance on the tasks despite high-average performance on tests of IQ, vocabulary and working memory tasks. Children with reading…

In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects'…

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…

Theoretically, prospective memory retrieval can be accomplished either by controlled monitoring of the environment for a target event or by a more reflexive process that spontaneously responds to the presence of a target event. These views were evaluated in Experiments 1-4 by examining whether performing a prospective memory task produced costs on…

Proactive interference (PI) may influence the predictive utility of working memory span tasks. Participants in one experiment (N=70) completed Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) and multiple versions of operation span and probed recall, modified for the type of memoranda (digits or words). Changing memoranda within- or across-trials…

The effect of increasing the number of stimuli to be recalled was investigated to evaluate whether sensitivity for memory impairment was enhanced in adults with Down syndrome when using higher task load. Three levels of load were compared across three groups of adults: those with cognitive deterioration, no cognitive deterioration over age 40, and…

Purpose: This study assessed the fast mapping performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) across the preschool to kindergarten age span in relation to their phonological memory and vocabulary development. Method: Fifty-three children diagnosed with SLI and 53 children with normal language (NL) matched for age and gender (30…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between working memory and text coherence in Chinese text comprehension. Eighty-six participants completed an operation-character working memory span task to be classified into low-span and high-span readers and a reading task to measure the time to detect inconsistency as well as the…

After consideration of the drawbacks of such psychometrically derived theories of cognitive abilities as those of Guttman, Cattell, and Guilford, appeal is made to E. B. Hunt's "distributive memory" model and A. Newell's concept of the "production system" as possible bases for developing an alternative theory. Such a theory of…