Examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations. Subjects were 42 three- to five-year-olds. Found in the children significant initial encoding and ability to retrieve event details. Also found an integration between children's theory of mind…

Children (N=20, age 9-12) with severe dyslexia were slower in counting from memory and naming alternating digits and letters than children with milder reading impairment. The children most disabled also had poorer phonological sensitivity, shorter digit spans, and lower verbal intelligence quotients. (Author/DB)

Hierarchical analysis of a test battery of sentence span, preload, and concurrent memory demand tasks was used to identify subgroups of children with different patterns of memory function. For each subgroup, performance strengths and weaknesses were related to reading, mathematics, and spelling performance. (Author/DB)

The study compared strategies chosen by second-grade learning disabled (LD) children with short-term memory problems, but with differences in naming facility, and same-age and younger nondisabled children. Subjects with poor naming abilities demonstrated selected strategy failures, while subjects with good naming abilities demonstrated more…

Empirical parallels between repetition priming (RP) and automaticity predicted by the instance theory were studied in 4 experiments with a total of 196 introductory psychology students. RP was viewed as the first few steps toward automaticity. Characteristics RP shares with automaticity, beyond a general speed-up with practice, are discussed. (SLD)

This response to Brainerd and Reyna's paper (in this issue) argues that the common resources hypothesis can be applied to a wider range of phenomena than can the output-interference hypothesis. Presents results of a dual-task experiment under bidirectional deficits. Concludes that dual-task studies do not provide critical tests of the resources…

The article examines the subgroup (15-20 percent) of learning disabled children who have problems with immediate verbatim recall of sequences of verbal information. Processing inefficiency in coding phonological language features leads to academic deficiencies in fluent word identification and word analysis skills. (Author/DB)

Outlines a cognitive model of the self-system, detailing the structural representation of self-relevant information in memory and the processes involved in retrieving and utilizing this information. Reports five experiments supporting the model. (MS)

This study delineates modes of thinking that differentiate exceptionally gifted children from more moderately gifted peers. Cognitive differences include viewing the simple as complex, a need for precision, viewing the complex as simple, abstract reasoning ability, early grasp of essential elements of an issue, high capacity for empathy,…

Examines preschool children's ability for advance planning and mishap prevention or remediation related to familiar events. Indicates that children three to five years old appear to use general event knowledge in constructing verbal plans. However, developmental differences in the quality of plans suggests that the ability of using general…

In four year olds who had been exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) before birth, prenatal exposure was associated with less efficient visual discrimination processing and more errors in short memory scanning. Postnatal exposure was unrelated to cognitive performance. (GLR)

Links between reading and short memory span, slow naming time, and slow speech rate were investigated for 140 fifth and sixth grade students given a reading test and tests of the 3 variables. Reading was best predicted by naming time, followed by speech rate; prediction from memory span was weak. (SLD)

This study of the haptic processing of 9 children with specific language impairment and 9 normal-language children (ages 5-7) found that both groups performed similarly when the response modality was tactile and task requirements were minimal and performed differently when response demands included cross-modal processing or increased symbolic and…

A meta-analysis of 268 studies suggested a deficit in subjects with mental retardation (compared to controls without mental retardation) across 12 categories of learning tasks, a relative deficit which remained, after training, across 7 categories of strategies. When strategy training was evaluated, the effect size was 0.701, which compares…

In study involving three experiments, high and low metamemory children aged five to seven were differentiated according to metamemory scores. Results showed children's performance differed significantly when demand of memory task fell within their knowledge of memory, and when task required more sophisticated strategy; children's ability to…