This letter points out flaws in van der Lely and Howard's argument that children with specific language impairments have no deficits in verbal short-term memory. The original methodology is faulted for providing uninterpretable assessment of verbal short-term functions and for failure to follow memory techniques from previous studies. Sample…

Undergraduates listened to a list of words and nonwords. They then listened to a list of items, some of which contained phonemic variations of items in the first list, and stated whether items had been presented previously. Subjects made more recognition errors to items that had phonemic variations occurring near the beginning rather than the end…

In memory strategy utilization deficiency, a child spontaneously produces an appropriate strategy but receives little or no benefit from it for recall. Three studies suggest two causes: children's failure to relate the task situation to their event knowledge, or to link the strategy to a second strategy, in this case linking a selective attention…

Sentences were presented to adolescents with and without mental retardation, and their memory for the object nouns of the sentences was then tested under various conditions. Results indicate that differences in sentence processing between individuals with and without mental retardation may be a result of differences in generating integrated…

Using 49 undergraduates, short-term memory (STM) spans, STM probe-recall tasks, and complex working memory (WM) spans were studied to assess the relationships among STM, WM, and verbal ability. Results indicate that STM and WM are separate cognitive constructs, and that both STM and WM are important to verbal abilities. (SLD)

Outlines a cognitive process model of abstracting, indexing, and classification that is based on text comprehension processes. Text comprehension for indexing versus other purposes is discussed, including conceptual and perceptual processing; conceptual knowledge and the development of expertise are discussed; and characteristics of short-term and…

Discrimination and phonetic identification abilities of children (ages 5-6) with language impairments were compared to those of normally developing 4-year-olds and previous findings on children and adults. Results support hypotheses suggesting disorders in the phonological component of working memory in children with language impairments and the…

Investigates relationships between verbal and visual short-term memory (STM) and the acquisition of decoding from the pre-reading through the early acquisition stages in 63 Hebrew-speaking children over a three-year period. Finds that visual parameters may make a crucial contribution to the acquisition of decoding skills, and the size of…

Investigates the extent to which differences in memory span for good and poor readers can be explained by differences in a long-term memory component to span as well as by differences in short-term memory processes. Discusses the nature of the interrelationships between memory span, reading and measures of phonological awareness. (SG)

Examines the performance on verbal short-term memory tasks of specifically reading disabled children relative to reading-age matched and chronological-age matched control groups. Examines memory span for words, highly wordlike nonwords and less wordlike nonwords, speech rates for these items, and nonword repetition. Suggests that there is a…

Infants can inhibit a prepotent but wrong action towards a goal in order to perform a causal means-action. It is not clear, however, whether infants can perform an arbitrary means-action while inhibiting a prepotent response. In four experiments, we explore this executive functioning in 18-24-month-old children. The working memory and inhibition…

Recent work suggests that infants rely on mechanisms of object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Such work shows that infants discriminate arrays containing 1, 2, or 3 objects, but fail with arrays greater than 3 [Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via object-files: Evidence from…

Semantic dementia patients make numerous phoneme migration errors in their immediate serial recall of poorly comprehended words. In this study, similar errors were induced in the word recall of healthy participants by presenting unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. This technique revealed that lexicality, word frequency, imageability,…

Several investigators have claimed over the past decade that working memory (WM) and general intelligence (g) are identical, or nearly identical, constructs, from an individual-differences perspective. Although memory measures are commonly included in intelligence tests, and memory abilities are included in theories of intelligence, the identity…

Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) investigated the development of inhibitory control in children aged 3 1/2 - 7 years using the day-night task. In two studies we build on Gerstadt et al.'s findings with a measure of inhibitory control that can be used throughout childhood. In Study 1 (twenty-four 3 1/2-year-olds and sixteen 5-year-olds) we…