Notes that the microgenetic method has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, and reviews data from three different microgenetic studies. Concludes that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without…

Studied whether memories of deceased play active roles in ongoing lives of survivors. Seventy-one people described a significant death. Four roles were reliably identified and labeled role model, situation specific guidance, values clarification, and remembrance formation. Role adoption was predicted by closeness of relationship and suddenness of…

Investigates the relation between foreign language proficiency and multilingual lexicosemantic organization, using two sets of unbalanced Dutch-English-French trilingual adults as participants. Results indicate that foreign language proficiency determines multilingual lexicosemantic organization. (35 references) (Author/CK)

A study explored working memory (WM) capacity, WM task requirements, as well as effects between WM, skills, knowledge base, and intelligence in adults with mental retardation and children aged 3-6 years. Adults were better on measures reflecting skills and knowledge base. Children performed better in phonological and visuo-spatial WM tasks.…

Summarizes recent studies identifying specific linguistic-cognitive markers for reading disabilities and describes efforts to develop measures of these markers in the areas of phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, and verbal short-term memory. (Author/DB)

In 2 experiments, the authors tested whether the classical modality effect--that is, the stronger recency effect for auditory items relative to visual items--can be extended to the spatial domain. An order reconstruction task was undertaken with four types of material: visual-spatial, auditory-spatial, visual-verbal, and auditory-verbal.…

Conventional wisdom is that some topics in introductory psychology are more difficult for students than others. Such wisdom seems reasonable given mismatches between students' and instructors' expectations and variations in both instructor expertise and student motivation across topical areas. Five instructors pooled students' exam performance…

This study determined the degree to which the phonological and executive components of memory reflect language-specific capacities in reading achievement. We tested whether the memory processes in a sample of English-language learners that played a major role in predicting second-language acquisition and risk for reading disability (RD) in Grade 1…

Two studies examined the possibility of retrieval-induced forgetting by 7-year-olds. Children heard a story while viewing pictures of events mentioned in the story, each highlighting objects drawn from two distinct semantic categories (e.g. animals and food). Over the next several days, children were asked the same yes/no questions about half the…

Background: The objective of this study is to identify intact and deficient cognitive processes in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and children with high functioning autism (HFA). Method: Three rigorously diagnosed groups of children aged between 6 and 12 years (54 ADHD, 41 HFA, and 41 normal controls) were tested on…

The authors measured memory for individual features (objects only or locations only) and the combination of those features (objects and locations) in 9-, 12-, and 21-year-old students with a "yes" or "no" recognition task. Analysis of recognition memory performance (d' scores) revealed that although age differences existed in memory for individual…

In this study, the author elucidated whether reading experience continues to contribute to word recognition skills in readers with well-internalized reading skills. The participants performed consecutive same or different judgments regarding the identicalness of letters, words, and pseudohomophones. For a more detailed examination of how increased…

We examined underlying mechanisms for comprehension differences across expository and narrative text while controlling for factors confounded in the extant literature. Fourth grade students (n=32) read both an expository and a narrative text, and completed both a local comprehension assessment, and a global retelling assessment for each text.…

"Wahkohtowin," a Cree word meaning kinship or the state of being related, is a fundamental concept for understanding Indigenous culture and traditional beliefs (Ermine 2001). This article describes how three researchers in western Canada incorporated this concept into a research project that compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous…

A group of Israeli high school students (h = 11) from two socially distinct schools read aloud a textbook account of a 1920 bloody encounter between Jews and Arabs. The study aimed at examining the relation between the textbook account and the students' formation of historical perceptions. Prior to reading the textbook excerpts, students wrote…