Two groups of deaf children, aged 8 and 14 years, were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess their reliance on phonological coding. Their performance was compared with that of hearing children of the same chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). Performance on the first task, short-term recall of pictures, showed that the deaf…

Background: Velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS, 22q 11.2 deletion) is characterized by severely delayed language development. The current study explored the integrity of verbal short-term memory (STM), a cognitive function critically involved in language development, in eight children with VCFS. Methods: Using a multiple case study design, we…

Children with developmental speech disorders may have additional deficits in speech perception and/or short-term memory. To determine whether these are only transient developmental delays that can accompany the disorder in childhood or persist as part of the speech disorder, adults with a persistent familial speech disorder were tested on speech…

Accounts of learning and generalization typically focus on factors related to lasting changes in representation (i.e., long-term memory). The authors present evidence that shorter term effects also play a critical role in determining performance and that these recency effects can be subdivided into perceptual and decisional components.…

This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The…

Although the Morris water task has been used in hundreds of studies of place learning, there have been no systematic studies of retention of the place memory. We report that retention, as measured by selective search behavior on a probe trial, is excellent when the retention interval is short (5-10 min). However, performance rapidly deteriorates,…

We report a series of experiments designed to explore the locus of the phonological deficit in dyslexia. Phonological processing of dyslexic adults is compared to that of age- and IQ-matched controls. Dyslexics' impaired performance on tasks involving nonwords suggests that sub-lexical phonological representations are deficient. Contrasting…

To determine the role of configural changes on the development of face encoding and memory, we investigated face recognition in an n-back repetition task with upright, inverted and contrast-reversed unfamiliar faces in adults and children (8-16 years). Repetitions occurred immediately (0-lag) or after one intervening face (1-lag). Face recognition…

Zero-order correlation coefficients show significant relationships between orthography, phonology, rapid naming, visual and auditory memory, and reading and spelling for 143 second through sixth graders. Although coefficients ranged from 0.05 to 0.71, most were statistically significant (65 out of 78). In addition, multiple regression analyses…

This study examined the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure, environmental risk, and maternal verbal intelligence on children's cognitive ability. Gender and age were examined as moderators of potential cocaine exposure effects. The Stanford-Binet IV intelligence test was administered to 231 children (91 cocaine exposed, 140 unexposed) at ages 4,…

The influence of cognitive growth in working memory (WM) on mathematical problem solution accuracy was examined in elementary school children (N = 353) at risk and not at risk for serious math problem solving difficulties. A battery of tests was administered that assessed problem solving, achievement, and cognitive processing (WM, inhibition,…

Background: Research has consistently documented a relationship between phonological short-term memory skills (STM) and specific language impairment (SLI). This study reports on the development of phonological STM abilities over 3 years in 80 young adolescents with a history of SLI, investigating the nature of the relationship between phonological…

Writing samples were examined from 42 post-secondary students with or without writing difficulties. Guided by the Simple View of Writing (Berninger et al., 2002), the samples were examined for evidence of difficulties with lower-order transcription processes and higher-order composition skills. Retrospective reports on writing strategies were also…

The "APA Educational Psychology Handbook" reflects the broad nature of the field today, with state-of-the-science reviews of the diverse critical theories driving research and practice; in-depth investigation of the range of individual differences and cultural/contextual factors that affect student achievement, motivation, and beliefs;…

Recently, confirmatory factor analysis has been extended to the case of dichotomous data (e.g., Muthen, 1978). In this study, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to all-or-none recall data from a designed experiment. In the experiment, subjects read pairs of English nouns and then tried to recall the right hand member of the pair when…