We investigated relative clause (RC) comprehension in 44 Russian-speaking children with typical language (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) (M age = 10;67, SD = 2.84) and 22 adults. Flexible word order and morphological case in Russian allowed us to isolate factors that are obscured in English, helping us to identify sources of…

As colleges and universities consider the purpose, curriculum, delivery, and design of undergraduate degrees in the twenty-first century, part of that discussion must involve pedagogical implications of courses that are both content rich and time-condensed. A review of the literature on construction courses under these constraints indicates that…

Purpose: This study examined the potential roles of phonological sensitivity and processing speed in age-related declines of verbal working memory. Method: Twenty younger and 25 older adults with age-normal hearing participated. Two measures of verbal working memory were collected: digit span and serial recall of words. Processing speed was…

The multimedia elements of text and audio need to be carefully integrated together to maximize the impact of those elements for learning in a multimedia environment. Redundancy information presented through audio and visual channels can inhibit learning for individuals diagnosed with ADHD, who may experience challenges in the processing of…

This study explored factors that are associated with calculation development among 176 children at-risk for learning difficulties. Data were collected on working memory, language, non-verbal reasoning, processing speed, decoding, numerical competence, incoming calculation, SES, and gender at the beginning of 1st grade and on calculations over 4…

One's ability to listen and comprehend spoken language of multiple utterances (i.e., listening comprehension) is one of the necessary component skills in reading and writing development. In this chapter, we review theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence of listening comprehension development and improvement, and propose a direct and mediated…

Ziegler and Phillipson (Z&P) have provided a valuable discussion of the identification and development of giftedness under a systemic umbrella, including issues of differing theoretical approaches and efficacy. This commentary considers their discussion within a novel systemic framework that links also individuals and environment, but in terms of…

Eyewitnesses often report details of the witnessed crime incorrectly. However, there is usually more than 1 eyewitness observing a crime scene. If this is the case, one approach to reconstruct the details of a crime more accurately is aggregating across individual reports. Although aggregation likely improves accuracy, the degree of improvement…

A recent hypothesis in empirical brain research on language is that the fundamental difference between animal and human communication systems is captured by the distinction between finite-state and more complex phrase-structure grammars, such as context-free and context-sensitive grammars. However, the relevance of this distinction for the study…

Four experiments examined the effect of phonological similarity between items and distractors on complex span performance. Item-distractor similarity benefited serial recall when distractors followed the items they were similar to, but not when distractors preceded the items they were similar to. These findings are predicted by C-SOB (contextual…

In the present study, the effect of phonological and working memory mechanisms involved in spelling Italian single words was explored in two groups of children matched for grade level: a group of normally hearing children and a group of pre-verbally deaf children, with severe-to-profound hearing loss. Three-syllable and four-syllable familiar…

In striking contrast to adults, in children sleep following training a motor task did not induce the expected (offline) gain in motor skill performance in previous studies. Children normally perform at distinctly lower levels than adults. Moreover, evidence in adults suggests that sleep dependent offline gains in skill essentially depend on the…

Does retrieval practice produce learning because it is an especially effective way to induce elaborative encoding? Four experiments examined this question. Subjects learned word pairs across alternating study and recall periods, and once an item was recalled it was dropped from further practice, repeatedly studied, or repeatedly retrieved on…

The social sciences rely on assumptions of a unified self for their explanatory logics. Recent work in the new multidisciplinary field of social neuroscience challenges precisely this unproblematic character of the subjective self as basic, well-defined entity. If disciplinary self-insulation is deemed unacceptable, the philosophical challenge…

The contribution of genetic factors to the memory is widely acknowledged. Research suggests that these factors include genes involved in the dopaminergic pathway, as well as the genes for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR). The activity of the products of these genes is affected by single…