Compares performance of 172 children aged 7 to 13 years on tasks involving visual or auditory presentation of rhyming and nonrhyming letters and an oral or written response. Results indicate insensitivity to phonological similarity for young children with disabilities; sensitivity improves with age, but deficits in short-term memory remain at…

Measures of memory for order were correlated with measures requiring mental manipulation, achievement, and aptitude using college and fifth grade students. A significant relationship was found for fifth graders but not for college students, suggesting that the nature and capacity of short-term memory changes with age. (Author/PN)

Discusses laws and general characteristics of normal memory, specifying how exceptional memory feats deviate from and contradict them. Also discusses research in support of the assertion that normal memory structure is sufficient to explain exceptional memory feats, if differences in practice and prior experiences are taken into account.…

Presents contrasting evidence on the rate of letter identification. (AEA)

This study examined cognitive ability, short-term verbal memory, and speech perception in relation to phonological awareness in 42 gifted and 49 regular 3rd and 4th graders and in 61 prereading kindergartners. Those with higher cognitive reasoning skills scored higher on tasks of phonological awareness than those with lower reasoning skills.…

Describes the process of design and development of two Web-based training templates (i.e., a newspaper metaphor and a theater metaphor) to prompt rapid development of active learning environments. Findings suggest that design elements to support limitations of short-term memory are important considerations in template design. (MES)

This study found that three measures of working memory capacity (processing and storage capacity, reading and listening span, and visual shape span) were good predictors of reading achievement in 30 orally educated children (ages 5 to 14) with hearing impairments as well as in an age-matched hearing control group. Degree of hearing loss did not…

Uses "word length" (syllable count) and "spoken duration" to examine cross-language equivalence of tests measuring short-term memory. Although the English and Spanish versions of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test had considerably different word length, the performance of bilingual college students did not differ between…

Examined whether speech rate is related to the amount recalled and if developmental increases in speech rate allow faster rehearsal with age, and hence, greater recall. Found that the group relationship was clear and replicable but that speech rates of individual children were not good predictors of those children's memory spans; age was found to…

Reports on experiments to determine effects of overt speech on children's use of inner speech in short-term memory. Word length and phonemic similarity had greater effects on older children and when pictures were labeled at presentation. Suggests that speaking or listening to speech activates an internal articulatory loop. (Author/GH)

Of three methods (free recall, verbally prompted recall, and visually prompted recall) for eliciting understanding of a folk tale by 35 adolescents with intellectual disability, none proved significantly better in eliciting story understanding. All measures correlated with short-term memory, suggesting that subjects' difficulty encoding stories…

Magnitude comparison, calculation verification, and short-term memory span experiments were conducted as a means of investigating number processing in 17 deaf college students with academic weaknesses. Deaf students' level of accuracy did not differ from that shown by their hearing peers; however, mean response times of deaf students were greater…

Examined nine measures of short-term memory (STM) used by school psychologists with group of learning-disabled (n=48) and educable mentally retarded (n=34) special education students. Results indicated that not all STM tasks were significant predictors of reading. Sentence memory task was best predictor for learning-disabled students; letter…

Four experiments with familial and clinical dyslexics aimed at defining primary processing deficits in adult dyslexia. Processes studied included phoneme perception and awareness, lexical retrieval, articulatory speed, and short-term memory. Only phoneme awareness met the criteria for primary deficit. Clinical dyslexics exhibited short-term memory…

A five-year follow-up of arithmetic calculation abilities of 10 low-income fourth graders with specific language impairment (SLI) involved comparisons with typically developing same age peers and with typically developing younger subjects. Results support evidence that children with SLI have difficulty with rote memory and document the…