Purpose: Children with neurodevelopmental disorders historically exhibit lower and more variable nonverbal intelligence (NVIQ) scores compared to their typically developing peers. We hypothesize that the intrinsic characteristics of the tests themselves, particularly the cognitive constructs they assess, may account for both the lower scores and…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

Examination of the influence of verbal working memory on sentence comprehension in 12 children with specific language impairment suggested that: (1) these children have less functional verbal working memory capacity than chronological age peers and (2) have greater difficulty managing working memory and general processing abilities than both age…

Eight-, eleven-, and nineteen-year-olds' memory for spatial locations over an extended time period was assessed. Study suggested that adults remember spatial location information better than children over time because adults code location information in more organized representations and use better retrieval cues. (RWB)

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…

Assesses children's recall performance using three memory instructions: standard free recall, repetition, and categorical processing. Recall performance was about equal for standard versus repetition and superior when category processing is used, especially with highly representative items. Concludes that at both 7 years and 10 years the…

Examines hypothesis that lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information. Second- and fifth-graders and college adults were shown word triplets and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. (Author/BE)

Free recall performance of children in grades three, five, seven, and nine and of adults was assessed according to a list of categorically related words. Results indicated that seventh and ninth graders were more apt to use associative relations to begin category clusters than were younger children or adults. (Author/BE)

This study examined the effectiveness of using "subject-performed tasks" to improve memory efficiency of eight autistic children. The procedure involved instructing children to carry out and later remember a series of actions. The procedure's effectiveness was attributed to autistic subjects' lack of verbal encoding strategies and…

Maintains that Teyler and Fountain's presentation (1987) contains several limitations, namely, that the authors do not (1) distinguish between learning and memory, nor between storage and retrieval; (2) address the role of knowledge-based influences in memory and learning; or (3) employ concepts that can accommodate developmental phenomena in the…

Investigates the developmental differences in spatial exploration and memory, depending on the purposes for which children six- to seven- and eight- to nine-years-old explored the space. The results suggest that children's knowledge of large-scale space is tailored to the purpose of acquiring such information. (Author/BB)

Challenges the notion that long-term memory retrieval efficiency is a potential source of individual and developmental differences in cognitive functioning. Fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college-aged subjects participated in a task using the Posner letter matching paradigm and were assessed with tests of verbal and spatial ability. (Author/CB)

Reports that both learning-disabled (LD) and non-learning-disabled (NORM) children recalled disproportionately more adjacent words than semantically related or spaced words in a free recall task. Spaced words were less likely to be recalled by the younger children and by the LDs. NORMs' recalls were governed by purposive semantic processing to a…

Verbal-repetition and picture-pointing tasks were used in this study of semantic, lexical, and phonological factors of short-term memory in 6 children (ages 6-9) with specific language impairment (SLI) and 17 language-matched control subjects. Both group and individual analyses found no significant differences between the performance of the SLI…

The goal of this study was to determine some of the factors that contribute to developmental differences children and adults display when they use cues to retrieve specific memories. (PCB)