Describes a two-year study of 76 prereading children, examining relationships between phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and the development of reading and spelling. Indicates that phonological awareness predicted later reading and spelling even when simple and backwards repetition were controlled. Suggests that verbal working memory…

Explores the challenge presented by the exercise of memory, through oral history, as an historical method. Notes the use of historical data generated by memory projects. Concludes that memory recollection, as a historical medium, can be a resource for bearing witness to history's power to shape lives as individuals experience it. (KDR)

Compared speaking rates, digit span, and speech timing in profoundly deaf 8- and 9-year-olds with cochlear implants and normal-hearing children. Found that deaf children displayed longer sentence durations and pauses during recall and shorter digit spans than normal-hearing children. Articulation rates strongly correlated with immediate memory…

Two studies examined progression in children's and adults' ability to monitor attempts to recall event details and the dependence of metamemory on question format. Only with an unbiased question format did subjects give higher confidence ratings after correct than after incorrect answers. When interviews contained misleading questions, children…

Story events were presented in Greek or English to 32 Greek-English bilingual children in grades 2 and 4. Children's recall 1-2 days later was organized more by story event (party versus breakfast) than by language. Cognitive processes that comprise bilingual memory, including encoding, storage, and retrieval strategies, are examined within the…

Discusses the need for new models and understanding of how we learn and develop independence to successfully prepare our youth for the 21st century. Topics include a new model of learning based on current understandings about the brain, human intelligence, and memory; and a transnational program called the 21st Century Learning Initiative.…

Examined the relationship between mothers' reports of their early attachment experiences and the quality of their current relationships with their youngest child, partner, mother, and father. Evaluated the argument that early attachment experiences provide mental models for all future relationships. Found that memories of early attachment…

Examined the effect of attention on infants' responses to briefly exposed visual stimuli. Found that the duration of stimulus exposure in the familiarization phase was positively correlated with the preference for the novel stimulus in the paired-comparison procedure, and processing of briefly presented visual stimuli differed depending on the…

Asked children and adults to recall events from "Sesame Street." Found that subjects' memory was influenced by causal factors (number of causal relations to other events, place in the story's causal chain) and this influence increased with age; children recalled actions, whereas adults recalled protagonists' goals; and children's recall…

Reviews literature on development of children's and adults' long-term retention. Finds that forgetting is dominated by storage (not retrieval) failures; trace recovery is dominated by retrieval (not storage) operations; and storage failure rates decline with age in childhood, whereas only modest developments occur in retrieval recovery operations.…

Strategies used by upper secondary school students to regulate their own learning processes were studied for 248 Australian students, 215 Japanese students in Japan, and 30 Japanese students in Australia. The pattern of strategy used varied for each cultural group, with Japanese students using memory strategies significantly more often. (SLD)

Illustrates games that can be used for developing vocabulary in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language classroom. The games are intended to be integrated into the general language syllabus and can be an important and enjoyable way of practicing vocabulary. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments with 164 individuals between 4 and 80 years old examined age-related changes in explicit memory for three perceptual features: item identity, color, and location. Findings indicated that performance on explicit memory tests was not a consistent inverted U-shaped function of age across various features, but depended on the…

Considers the nature of joint (parent-child) pre-school activities in the home, and their potential to contribute to the development of early reading skills. Assesses children on various aspects of phonological awareness, and their receptive vocabulary and short-term memory. Finds that children who engaged in a variety of pre-school, parent-child…

This article discusses the crucial role that working memory (WM) plays in learning a second language and analyzes cross-linguistic differences in digit span. It argues that word span and semantic span should be considered in WM analysis. A semantic system is proposed in the WM model for language. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)