A study of the relationship of bilingualism to personality traits focused on two questions: (1) are any language-associated differences between memory systems in bilinguals reflected in similar differences in personality structures?; and (2) if such differences exist, can they be tapped by comparing responses to personality-evoking stimulus in the…

The present study investigated the relationship between developmental shifts in the organization of materials and developmental changes in deliberate strategy use. Second- and fourth-grade children were presented with clusterable sort/recall lists representing the factorial combinations of high and low inter-item association and high and low…

A study investigated the immediate recall protocol as a means of determining what second language learners retain of a spoken text. Three factors in comprehension were considered: topic familiarity, topic accessibility, and topic structure. A dialogue, a news broadcast, and a popular song were all presented to groups of beginning-level students of…

The legitimacy of using the criterion of low reading achievement in the study of learning and memory skills with learning disabled children was assessed, based on a comparison of 35 nondisabled students, 15 low readers, and 10 learning disabled high school students. Learning disabilities were defined as encompassing perceptual and/or processing…

The applicability of Rosch and coworkers' concept of prototypes to the mental categorization of medical disorders, and the influence of clinical experience on those memory structures were studied with 100 preclinical medical students and 77 experienced physicians from Quebec, Canada. The third-year medical students were French-speaking and read…

A study was conducted to examine the hypothesis that the distracting nature of incidental information inherent to television news, combined with the absence of headlines, might result in television viewers remembering less central and more incidental information than they would when reading a newspaper article that uses headlines to condense the…

Two studies were conducted with English speakers to investigate (1) the facilitative effects of melodic features of speech, and (2) whether poor readers (without evidence of sensory defect) show a greater impairment than good readers when melodic features are made unavailable in the speech input. It was hypothesized that when melodic cues are not…

Five experiments examined the developmental relation between attention to target and context information and target memory among second and fifth graders and college adults. Results show that when the context is meaningfully related to target information, adults are less selective than children and are more likely to attend to context information.…

Two studies with 170 third-, 303 fifth-, and 288 seventh-graders in Heidelberg (West Germany) compared memory performance and text comprehension of groups equivalent on domain-specific knowledge of the game of soccer but differing in overall aptitude. Whether prior knowledge or overall aptitude level was more important in acquiring/using new…

Two studies with 33 reading-disabled and 31 non-reading-disabled second through fourth graders indicate that young disabled readers may not be able to hold phonemic information in their memories long enough to make adequate discrimination of phonological information within syllables. (SLD)

Fifty-six field-dependent and 55 field-independent students in grades 6 through 8 were assessed on reading comprehension tasks varying in memory load and cognitive restructuring requirements. Field-independent readers outperformed field-dependent readers on tasks with high memory demands and requirements for efficient restructuring. (SLD)

Notes that the microgenetic method has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, and reviews data from three different microgenetic studies. Concludes that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without…

"Wahkohtowin," a Cree word meaning kinship or the state of being related, is a fundamental concept for understanding Indigenous culture and traditional beliefs (Ermine 2001). This article describes how three researchers in western Canada incorporated this concept into a research project that compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous…

Purpose: This study explored the effect of frequency (number of presentations), and spacing (period between presentations) on verb learning in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children learn words more efficiently when presentations are frequent and appropriately spaced, and this study investigated whether children with SLI…

A study investigated the role of pragmatics, the factors that govern choice of language in social interaction, on interpretation of elliptical verb phrases (VPs) in spoken English by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Ellipsis requires the listener to recall the surface form of a presupposed element and to integrate it into the…