This study explored the contribution of the phonological and executive working memory (WM) systems to 205 (102 girls, 103 boys, 6 to 9 years old) elementary school children's fluid and crystallized intelligence. The results show that (a) a 3-factor structure (phonological short-term memory [STM], visual-spatial WM, and verbal WM) was comparable…

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a disorder of unknown aetiology, characterized by chronic widespread pain, stiffness and sleep disturbances. In addition, patients frequently complain of memory and attention deficits. Accumulating evidence suggests that FM is associated with CNS dysfunction and with an altered brain morphology. However, few studies have…

Patterns of language are usually perceived, learned and used as meaningful chunks that are processed as a whole, resulting in a reduced learning burden and increased fluency. The ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together is an important part of language acquisition. This paper…

Research showing that activation of negative stereotypes can impair the performance of stigmatized individuals on a wide variety of tasks has proliferated. However, a complete understanding of the processes underlying these stereotype threat effects on behavior is still lacking. The authors examine stereotype threat in the context of research on…

Vygotsky speculated that parents play an important role in the intellectual development of their children, and that this role includes the transfer of expectations related to their children's academic achievement. Consequently, different parents can produce different contexts of academic achievement for their children. The participants were 215…

This study investigated the role of cognitive and language skills as predictors of early literacy skills in children with Specific Language Impairment. A range of cognitive and linguistic skills were assessed in a sample of 137 eight-year-old children with SLI at the beginning of the school year, and 6 months later on word decoding and reading…

Reading difficulties and disabilities present serious and potentially lifelong challenges. Children who do not read well are more likely to be retained a grade in school, drop out of high school, become a teen parent, or enter the juvenile justice system. Building on the extant research and seminal studies, including the National Reading Panel and…

The paper reports on two experiments in Braille learning which compared blind and sighted subjects on the immediate recall of haptically-examined Braille symbols. In the first study, sighted subjects (N=64) haptically examined each of a set of Braille symbols with their preferred or nonpreferred hand and immediately recalled the symbol by drawing…

Short-term memory data showed that differences between groups were confined mainly to recall of recency items; within the three older groups, superior readers were superior to competent readers, who in turn were superior to disabled readers; younger competent readers were superior to older disabled readers, despite similarity in reading test…

Two-digit span tasks compared the distraction performance of 32 learning disabled (LD) high schoolers and non LD Ss. No differential distraction effect was found on the first set (matching nondistraction and distraction conditions). In set two, (distraction condition was designed to be more discriminating), a differential distraction effect was…

Experiment 1 showed that LD adults and normal third graders recalled significantly less of a story they had heard than university adults; sixth graders and community college adults were intermediate. In Experiment 2, simple repetition was shown to be extremely effective for improving story recall. (Author)

This study investigated whether phonological working memory was associated with spoken language development in 38 preschool children. Significant differences were found, with children who had good phonological memory abilities producing language that was more grammatically complex, contained a richer array of words, and included longer utterances…

Describes memory task performance of a 50-year-old female with a phonological short-term memory (STM) impairment. The patient showed a deficit of syntactic parsing restricted to the auditory modality, possibility because of an impaired STM and an impaired syntactic parser. Test material and results are appended. (Contains 39 references.) (Author)

Working memory, the ability to temporarily retain task-relevant information across a delay, is frequently investigated using delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) or delayed Go/No-Go tasks (DGNG). In DMTS tasks, sample cues instruct the animal which type of response has to be executed at the end of a delay. Typically, performance decreases with…

The paper describes the performance of three children with specific visuospatial working memory (VSWM) impairments (Study 1) and three children with visuospatial (nonverbal) learning disabilities (Study 2) assessed with a battery of working memory (WM) tests and with a number of school achievement tasks. Overall, performance on WM tests provides…