Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

The use and understanding of ordinal terms (e.g., "first" and "second") is a developmental milestone that has been relatively unexplored in the preschool age range. In the present study, 4- and 5-year-olds watched as a reward was placed in one of three train cars labeled by the experimenter with an ordinal (e.g.,…

In unidimensional absolute identification tasks, participants identify stimuli that vary along a single dimension. Performance is surprisingly poor compared with discrimination of the same stimuli. Existing models assume that identification is achieved using long-term representations of absolute magnitudes. The authors propose an alternative…

Background: Individuals with Down syndrome consistently perform less well than appropriately matched comparison groups on tests of verbal short-term memory, despite performing relatively well on non-verbal short-term memory tasks. However, it is not clear whether these findings constitute evidence for a selective deficit in verbal short-term…