Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

Examined role of accuracy motivation in event recall among 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds, and adults. In high accuracy motivation condition, children as young as 6 were to withhold uncertain answers for benefit of accuracy. Expected quality-quantity tradeoff emerged only for peripheral items. The "I don't know" option condition decreased the…

Presents a test of phonological awareness which does not require that subjects speak or hear to participate. Notes that the test was designed to minimize memory loads, and to measure speeded written naming and segmentation-by-sound. Concludes that the data represents the first direct demonstration of phonological abilities in deaf subjects, using…

Explores the extent to which children with specific language impairment (SLI) with severe phonological working memory deficits express knowledge uniquely in gesture as compared to speech. Using a paradigm in which gesture-speech relationships have been studied extensively, children with SLI and conversation judgment-matched, typically developing…

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…

Nine closed head injured (CHI) children (mean age 11 years) with post-onset intervals of 7 months to 8 years were given an overt free recall task. Quantitative analysis suggested inefficient passive rehearsal strategy by severely injured subjects. Qualitative analysis revealed differences between CHI children and controls in rehearsal strategies,…

Thirty-six learning disabled (LD) and 36 nondisabled children (mean age = 12) were presented with sentences under either of 2 conditions and then given a recognition and source attribution task. The study concluded that, though LD children did not differ in recognition performance, results did suggest that children with LD possess a general…

Argues that although people may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire "common knowledge" from the news media; and time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge. (SR)

Maintains that Muller and Overton (1998) misrepresent her theory of infant concept formation in infancy, makes corrections to their representation, and notes that her theory was developed in part because of the lack of detailed mechanisms in Piaget's theory to account for concept formation. Argues that Muller and Overton's proposed alternative…

Investigates the relation between comprehension skill and the ability to locate information. Results reveal that good comprehenders were more efficient than poor comprehenders when they were required to locate specific pieces of information in a text. Findings suggest that good comprehenders' superior search strategy may arise because of their…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures were used to study the potential effects of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity on the processing of sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity in German. Results indicate that syntactic processes in language comprehension are related to individual differences in…

Notes young children's fast mapping ability for word and fact learning. Finds children's extension of a new word to novel objects from same category but lack of extension for new facts, as replicated by Waxman and Booth, unsurprising. Poses more interesting question: is word learning done solely through more general cognitive systems or through…

Offers brief descriptions of 41 good books for children offering a treasury of memory, memoir, and stories. Presents books in the following categories: storytellers, folktales, voices, family, artifacts, and preservation. (SR)

Presents new measure of children's use of an editing operation that suppresses false memories by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Application of the methodology showed that false-memory editing increased dramatically between early and middle childhood. Measure reacted appropriately to experimental manipulations. Developmental reductions…

Investigates the developmental changes in the contributions of comprehension ability and the meta-cognitive control of several study strategies (selection, memory, monitoring) to competence in studying among average and above-average seventh and eleventh-grade students. Indicates that the ability to comprehend and meta-cognitive control of study…