In a series of experiments, participants were required to keep track of 1 or 2 working memory (WM) objects, having to update their values in 80% of the trials. Updating cost, defined as the difference between update and non-update trials, was larger when 2 objects were involved compared with when there was only 1 object was involved. This finding…

Context variability can be defined as the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given concept appears. Following M. Steyvers and K. J. Malmberg's (2003) work, the authors have shown that concepts that are experienced in fewer preexperimental contexts generally are better remembered in episodic memory tasks than concepts that are …

Talking with friend about personal photographs is a recognizable as an activity in which people participate in the modern world. This dissertation presents three studies examining the locally initial person reference formulations used to refer to people in the photographs in such an activity. The first study shows how the speakers narrating the…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

Young adults with a history of specific language impairment (SLI) differ from reading-impaired (dyslexic) individuals in terms of limited vocabulary and poor verbal short-term memory. Phonological short-term memory has been shown to play a significant role in learning new words. We investigated the neural signatures of auditory word recognition…

Considering the popularity of the Internet, an automatic interactive feedback system for Elearning websites is becoming increasingly desirable. However, computers still have problems understanding natural languages, especially the Chinese language, firstly because the Chinese language has no space to segment lexical entries (its segmentation…

Despite the popularity of leadership education on college campuses, little is known about what individual participants learn and remember. This longitudinal study examines the impact of a leadership education retreat through the eyes of six undergraduate college men. Entry and exit interviews, along with intensive one and two year follow-up…

Two experiments examined whether text composition engages verbal, visual, and spatial working memory to different degrees. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students composed by longhand a persuasive text while performing a verbal, visual, or spatial concurrent task that was presented visually. In Experiment 2, participants performed a verbal or…

The main objective in the present study is to examine the effect of gender on primary school students' construction of elaborative backward inferences during text processing. A total of 333 children, aged 10-11 years (n = 158 girls and 175 boys) participated in the study. Each participant completed a backward inference test. The results indicate…

The prion protein Met129Val polymorphism has recently been related to human long-term memory with carriers of either the 129[superscript MM] or the 129[superscript MV] genotype recalling 17% more words than 129[superscript VV] carriers at 24 h following learning. Here, we sampled genotype differences in retrieval-related brain activity at 30 min…

Recent psychological and neuropsychological research suggests that executive functions--the cognitive control processes that regulate thought and action--are multifaceted and that different types of executive functions are correlated but separable. The present multivariate twin study of 3 executive functions (inhibiting dominant responses,…

The effects of environmental stimulation and parental nurturance on brain development have been studied extensively in animals. Much less is known about the relations between childhood experience and cognitive development in humans. Using a longitudinally collected data set with ecologically valid in-home measures of childhood experience and later…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

Malay is an alphabetic language with transparent orthography. A Malay reading-related assessment battery which was conceptualised based on the International Dyslexia Association definition of dyslexia was developed and validated for the purpose of dyslexia assessment. The battery consisted of ten tests: Letter Naming, Word Reading, Non-word…

This study investigates the personal communication memories and experiences of adult deaf people during their childhoods in their homes. In order to obtain relevant information in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty four Cypriot deaf individuals between the ages of 19 to 54 years with different family and school…