Discrimination and phonetic identification abilities of children (ages 5-6) with language impairments were compared to those of normally developing 4-year-olds and previous findings on children and adults. Results support hypotheses suggesting disorders in the phonological component of working memory in children with language impairments and the…

This report describes the development of the Family Background Questionnaire, a 179-item instrument with 22 subscales designed to assess memories of family characteristics. Results with 1,020 college students in three separate studies for initial reliability and validity, factor analysis, and test-retest reliability support the reliability and…

A new procedure, the Letter Memory Test, was developed for evaluating adequacy of effort given during neuropsychological testing. It is a computer-administered forced-choice recognition task. In three studies involving nearly 400 patients and community volunteers, the test discriminated among poorly and highly motivated groups, and its internal…

Presents a unified theoretical approach to children's false-memory reports that deals with both spontaneous and implanted reports. Details false recognition and misinformation models that allow researchers to determine the impact of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment in false memory reports. (LBT)

Notes that there has been far less mathematical modeling of children's memory than of adults' memory. Explores the flaw in fuzzy-trace model, and maintains that situations in which partial verbatim information is used along with partial gist information fall outside the boundary of this type of model. Suggests refining the concepts of and…

Notes that a multitude of studies have demonstrated that misleading postevent information affects people's memories. Contents that the fuzzy-trace theory is a positive step toward understanding the malleability of memory. Discusses fuzzy-trace theory in terms of three primary areas of study: altered response format, maximized misinformation…

Notes that spontaneous false memories are a routine part of everyday memory and more common than implanted false memory. Commends the fuzzy-trace theory for the separation and explanation of these two sources of inaccuracy. Demonstrates the theory's handling of three phenomena concerning the creation and maintenance of false memories. (LBT)

Notes that fuzzy-trace theory provides a link between indices of memory performance and the theoretical processes that underlie that performance. Author argues false memories can arise because of processes that normally affect forgetting. Maintains that, to the extent that memories lose their distinctive properties, such memories may become…

Suggests that fuzzy-trace theory may replace dominant metaphors of cognitive development. Discusses theoretical climate of the 1980s when the theory was first formulated. Describes how, by integrating new ideas about how cognitive development was viewed into a coherent framework, the theory slowly gained acceptance as critical aspects of it were…

Students with and without mental retardation from three age groups (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 15-17), were compared on implicit and explicit memory tasks. Students without mental retardation performed better on the explicit memory task, but there was no difference between groups on the implicit memory task. (Author/CR)

Offers brief annotations of 34 children's books published in 1998. Organizes them around themes of stories, a child's view, crossing borders, ways of words, memories, and challenges. (SR)

Describes the Liberal Arts Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at Guibbio, Italy. Discusses how the room's design and decoration mirrors its educational uses. Notes that the object of education was to provide the young person with a kind of mental library of materials that could be drawn upon quickly. (RS)

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)

Argues that metamemory should be conceptualized as personalized, constructed knowledge consisting of accurate and naive beliefs. Illustrates the advantages of such a conceptualization using data about the development of children's beliefs about long-term retention. Concludes by sketching future directions for research in this area. (DSK)

Examines the literature on the validity of memory work and the evidence for the efficacy of therapeutic interventions based on the recovery of childhood-sexual-abuse memories. Current empirical evidence does not support recovered-memory therapy; in fact, participation in recovered-memory therapy may be harmful to clients. (Author/EMK)