We describe a linguistic clue to speakers' states of mind that has utility for psychotherapists and counselors, and summarize the theoretical and empirical support for using this clue in clinical practice. Specifically, we posit that the degree to which people relate stressful episodes from their lives as a chronological sequence of events is…

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: (a) judging…

During the second year of life, infants develop a preference to attach novel labels to novel objects. This behavior is commonly known as "mutual exclusivity" (Markman, 1989). In an intermodal preferential looking experiment with 19.5- and 22.5-month-olds, stimulus repetition was critical for observing mutual exclusivity. On the first…

Previous studies have shown that the right hemisphere processes the visual details of objects and the emotionality of information. These two roles of the right hemisphere have not been examined concurrently. In the present study, the authors examined whether right hemisphere processing would lead to particularly good memory for the visual details…

The aim of the present study is to investigate the learning-related changes in brain activation induced by the training of hypothesis generation skills regarding biological phenomena. Eighteen undergraduate participants were scanned twice with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after training over a period of 2 months. The…

Solving algebraic word problems involves multiple cognitive phases. The authors used a multitask approach to examine the extent to which working memory and executive functioning are associated with generating problem models and producing solutions. They tested 255 11-year-olds on working memory (Counting Recall, Letter Memory, and Keep Track),…

It is well established that working memory is related to reading comprehension ability. However, its role in explaining specific reading comprehension difficulties is still under debate: the issue mainly concerns whether the contribution of working memory is dependent on task modality (verbal tasks being more predictive than visuo-spatial tasks)…

Purpose: This study was designed to replicate and extend a previous study of inferencing in which some adults with right hemisphere damage (RHD) generated but did not maintain predictive inferences over time (M. Lehman-Blake & C. Tompkins, 2001). Two hypotheses were tested: (a) inferences were deactivated, and (b) selection of previously generated…

A total of 82 Chinese 11- and 12-year-olds with and without dyslexia were tested on four paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in three different experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children with dyslexia were significantly poorer in visual-verbal…

When language learners are exposed to inconsistent probabilistic grammatical patterns, they sometimes impose consistency on the language instead of learning the variation veridically. The authors hypothesized that this regularization results from problems with word retrieval rather than from learning per se. One prediction of this, that easing the…

We investigated the influence of self-efficacy beliefs and working memory capacity on mathematical problem-solving performance, response time, and efficiency (i.e., the ratio of problems solved correctly to time). Students completed a letter-recoding task (Experiment 1) or an operation span task (Experiment 2), rated their self-efficacy for…

The main purpose of this study was to assess whether seventh-grade students use of information and communication technology (ICT) was related to performance on working memory tasks. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between ICT use and performance on working memory tasks interacted with seventh-grade students' socioeconomic…

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining…

The transcription factor cAMP response-element binding protein (CREB) has a pivotal role in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and hippocampus-dependent long-term memory. We recently demonstrated that the dorsal hippocampal CA3 region is involved in memory consolidation of spatial information tested on a Morris water maze in mice. To test whether…

It has been suggested that there are systematic distortions in children's memory for temporal durations, such that children's memory is not just less accurate than that of adults but qualitatively different. Experiment 1 replicated the memory distortion effect by demonstrating developmental change in the tendency to confuse a reference duration…