Three groups of boys, aged 6, 9, and 12 years, performed a positioning task with retention intervals of 10 and 30 seconds and visual-plus-kinesthetic or kinesthetic-only cues. Developmental differences were evidenced between the six-year-olds and older boys but not between the two older groups. (Author/SJL)

Compared two-month old's abilities to detect changes in word order for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus two unrelated, but well-formed, sentence fragments. Results suggest that infants are able to remember the order of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosodic structure of a single well-formed sentence. (HTH)

Measured cognitive processing time, imagery skill, and spatial memory span of 128 children and adults, ages 8 to 20 years. Found that performance on spatial memory span tasks was largely predicted by imagery skill, which in turn was strongly linked to processing time; age was much less of a predictor in both cases. (EAJ)

Two experiments investigated short-term visual person recognition in 8- and 10-year-olds and adults within Tanaka and Farah's part-whole paradigm. Results revealed that person recognition became more accurate between 8 years and adulthood but there was no developmental shift in visual information processes with face and whole person recognition.…

This sixth in a series of edited transcripts based on a conference at Utah State University discusses ideas from cognitive psychology that have implications for instructional design. Highlights include information processing phases; pattern recognition; short-term and long-term memory; purposes of instruction; cognitive structures; and cognitive…

The primary language hypothesis of short-term memory coding was challenged by an experiment with eight normally hearing college students and a review of the literature about deaf subjects. Whether or not deaf signers recode printed words into sign depends on a variety of task and subject factors. (SLD)

Research has found similarities between specific reading disability and reading difficulty in children of low intelligence, especially in short-term memory deficits. Studies indicate that ability to acquire and use a knowledge of spelling patterns is a major problem, and efforts to teach more efficient decoding skills have met with limited…

Performance of 36 second graders in judging grammaticality was not associated with reading ability or metaphonological skill, while performance in correcting violations of grammaticality was strongly associated. Short-term memory had minimal effects on judgment performance, but greatly affected correction performance. Both judgment and correction…

The study compared strategies chosen by second-grade learning disabled (LD) children with short-term memory problems, but with differences in naming facility, and same-age and younger nondisabled children. Subjects with poor naming abilities demonstrated selected strategy failures, while subjects with good naming abilities demonstrated more…

The article examines the subgroup (15-20 percent) of learning disabled children who have problems with immediate verbatim recall of sequences of verbal information. Processing inefficiency in coding phonological language features leads to academic deficiencies in fluent word identification and word analysis skills. (Author/DB)

Five experiments examined the extent and nature of the referential source errors of 5- to 10-year-old children who listened to stories containing a referential utterance. The results supported five conclusions about children's confusion of different sources of information in referential communication. (SW)

Presents the first stage in a research effort developing a detailed computational model of working memory. The central feature of the model is counterintuitive. It is assumed that there is a primacy gradient of activation across successive list items. A second stage of the model is influenced by the combined effects of the primacy gradient and…

In four year olds who had been exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) before birth, prenatal exposure was associated with less efficient visual discrimination processing and more errors in short memory scanning. Postnatal exposure was unrelated to cognitive performance. (GLR)

Examined the phonological analysis and verbal working memory components of the sound categorization task and their relationships to reading skill differences. Children were tested on sound categorization by having them identify odd words in sequences. Sound categorization performance was sensitive to individual differences in speech perception…

Examined whether a detailed analysis of age-related changes in error patterns could reveal the mechanisms underpinning development in short-term memory. Tested developmental changes among 7- to 11-year-olds in their serial recall of lists of 6 letters, finding developmental differences in the patterns of errors. (JPB)