Eighteen children (ages 6-16) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were compared to 20 controls on both process and product scores from the California Verbal Learning Test for Children. Children with ADHD initially learned the same number of words as controls but showed weaknesses recalling the words after delays. (Contains…

Describes a preschool child's gradual acquisition of a play language, Pig Latin, and discusses the abilities and errors that were measured over the course of acquisition. Acquisition improved as the subject developed language abilities involving word identification, first-consonant deletion, suffix creation, and short-term memory for speech units.…

A review of 25 studies of the use of videotapes in patient education found that while the technique increases patient short-term knowledge, it is no better than traditional methods in increasing long-term knowledge or promoting compliance with medical regimens. Its strength appears to be in role-modeling. (Author/MSE)

Two experiments examined the development of children's memory for spatial location or color. Results refuted the proposal that in contrast to color, spatial location would not show developmental improvement because it is remembered automatically. Suggests that, for the age range studied, there was developmental change in the efficiency of…

Investigated development of working memory in the transitional period from infancy to preschool years. The age-related increase in scores on the Imitation Sorting Task (IST) appeared to be about one unit every six months. Results suggest that the IST has a good construct validity. (AA)

This article reports the results of digit-span tests administered to 314 children who were visually impaired. Results found that gender, first language, and educational setting had no effect on the children's scores and that the congenitally totally blind children scored higher than did sighted children, whereas those who had had some sight did…

A model illustrates how humans interact with information and construct representations using short- and long-term memory. It shows that learners' prior knowledge and effective instructional materials have a significant effect on how competence is translated into good performance. (SK)

Recall of "to-be-remembered items" benefited from schematically related, superordinate, and slot filler cues, but not coordinate cues. The relative strength of different relationships does not appear to change with age. Findings are consistent with the view that lexical memory is schematically and taxonomically organized from early…

Study sought to determine whether separate short-term auditory and visual memory factors would emerge given a sufficient number of markers in a factor matrix. A principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation was performed. Short-term visual and short-term auditory memory factors emerged as expected. (RJM)

Research evidence is reviewed to show that transcription and working memory processes constrain the development of composition skills in students with and without learning disabilities and that in turn other processes constrain the development of transcription and working memory skills. Interventions for transcription are discussed. (Author/CR)

Suggests simple planning and instructional strategies to improve student learning and understanding for present and long -term application. The first section discusses learner-related issues. The second section focuses on the lesson plan (the introduction, the lesson body, and the lesson closure). The third section examines other strategies for…

Nine adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) and nine age- and IQ-matched adults with PWS completed standardized tests of long-term and short-term memory, visual and auditory processing, and reading and mathematics achievement. Contrary to previous findings, long-term memory in PWS subjects was strong relative to IQ and there was no evidence that…

Examines the relative contribution of phonological short term memory (STM) to vocabulary acquisition in 5-year-old children. The results show that work span, rhyme detection and nonword repetition predict concurrent vocabulary level at age 5. When the study was repeated with same subjects one year later, span and rhyme detection again predicted…

The authors determined whether the cognitive processes that underlie second-language acquisition difficulties are the same as those that underlie reading difficulties. First-grade (N = 101) bilingual and nonbilingual children were administered a battery of measures in Spanish and English. English word identification and vocabulary were predicted…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…