The research studies presented in this special issue rest on two assumptions: firstly, that limitations in verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory (vSTM/WM) capacity are likely to be related to impairments in syntax, and secondly that this relationship is likely to be causal, with impairments in vSTM/WM causing impairments in syntax. In…

This paper systematically reviews the studies of working memory in second language learning in China over the past 20 years. A total of 140 studies that were published in 13 major foreign language journals during the past 20 years (2000-2019) were categorized and analyzed according to research method, educational level, and research content. For…

This letter points out flaws in van der Lely and Howard's argument that children with specific language impairments have no deficits in verbal short-term memory. The original methodology is faulted for providing uninterpretable assessment of verbal short-term functions and for failure to follow memory techniques from previous studies. Sample…

This paper, responding to Gathercole and Baddeley's commentary (EC 611 105), defends van der Lely and Howard's 1993 argument that deficits in verbal short-term memory (VSTM) do not cause children's specific language impairments (SLI). It is argued that while some children with SLI may have VSTM problems, the fact that many do not eliminates VSTM…

Of three methods (free recall, verbally prompted recall, and visually prompted recall) for eliciting understanding of a folk tale by 35 adolescents with intellectual disability, none proved significantly better in eliciting story understanding. All measures correlated with short-term memory, suggesting that subjects' difficulty encoding stories…

Working memory is where we "think" as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and…

Accounting for verbal reports requires explication of the mechanisms by which the reports are generated and influenced by experimental factors. We discuss different cognitive processes underlying verbalization and present a model of how subjects, when asked to think aloud, verbalize information from their short-term memory. (Author/GDC)

In third-grade and tenth-grade subjects, results included (1) the absence of age differences in proportionalized short-term retention and (2) significant age differences in long-term retention only between groups that had received a different number of learning trials. (Author/CI)