Groups of first-grade (mean age = 82 months), third-grade (mean age = 107 months), and fifth-grade (mean age = 131 months) children with a learning disability in mathematics (MD, n=58) and their normally achieving peers (n = 91) were administered tasks that assessed their knowledge of counting principles, working memory, and the strategies used to…

Profiles of verbal learning and memory performance were compared for typically developing children and for four developmental disorders characterized by different patterns of language functioning: specific language impairment, early focal brain damage, Williams Syndrome, and Down Syndrome. A list-learning task was used that allowed a detailed…

This study explored the degree of verbal short-term memory deficit among individuals with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome, and the extent to which any such impairment could be accounted for by a relative slowing of rehearsal and output processes. Measures of serial recall and detailed assessments of speeded articulation for short and long…

Two groups of deaf children, aged 8 and 14 years, were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess their reliance on phonological coding. Their performance was compared with that of hearing children of the same chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). Performance on the first task, short-term recall of pictures, showed that the deaf…

Children classified as hyperlexic learn to read words spontaneously before age five, are impaired in both reading and listening comprehension, and exhibit word recognition skills above their linguistic and cognitive abilities. Despite their strong word recognition skills, previous studies have shown that the phonemic awareness skills of hyperlexic…

Four experiments examined the flexibility and stability with which children and adults organize locations into categories based on their spatiotemporal experience with locations. Seven-, 9-, 11-year-olds, and adults learned the locations of 20 objects in an open, square box. During learning, participants experienced the locations in four…

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel,…

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have the potential to significantly disrupt a student's cognitive, academic, social, emotional, behavioral, and physical functioning. It is important for educators to appreciate the array of difficulties students with TBI may experience in order to appropriately assess needs and create an educational plan that…

Four experiments are reported exploring whether distractor pictures activate their phonological properties in the course of speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two pictures and were asked to name one while ignoring the other. Distractor pictures were phonologically related, semantically related or unrelated to the…

The goal of this study was to test the effectiveness of a Language Wizard/Player with Baldi, a computer-animated tutor, for teaching new vocabulary items to children with a hearing loss. Eight students with hearing loss, between the ages of 6 and 10, were tested and trained for about 20-30 minutes a day, 2 days a week for about 10 weeks on three…

This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The…

The present studies explored the role of the medial striatum in learning when task contingencies change. Experiment 1 examined whether the medial striatum is involved in place reversal learning. Testing occurred in a modified cross-maze across two consecutive sessions. Injections of the local anesthetic, bupivacaine, into the medial striatum, did…

Stressful life events can have profound effects on our cognitive and motor abilities, from those that could be construed as adaptive to those not so. In this review, I discuss the general notion that acute stressful experience necessarily impairs our abilities to learn and remember. The effects of stress on operant conditioning, that is, learned…

The polysialylated neural cell adhesion molecule (PSA-NCAM) has been implicated in activity-dependent synaptic remodeling and memory formation. Here, we questioned whether training-induced modulation of PSA-NCAM expression might be related to individual differences in spatial learning abilities. At 12 h posttraining, immunohistochemical analyses…

It is well established that the cerebellum and its associated circuitry are essential for classical conditioning of the eyeblink response and other discrete motor responses (e.g., limb flexion, head turn, etc.) learned with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). However, brain mechanisms underlying extinction of these responses are still…