Background: Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with fronto-striatal dysfunction. There is debate as to the extent to which TS is associated with cognitive impairment. Some authors argue that any impairments seen are attributable to comorbid psychiatric symptomatology, whilst others have suggested that…

Background: The specificity of impairments in specific reading disabilities (SRD) and specific language impairments (SLI) has recently been questioned, with many children recruited for studies of SRD and SLI demonstrating impairments in both reading and oral language development. This has implications for the results of SRD and SLI studies where…

Background: This study reports the language and memory progress over five years of 30 adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome, and investigates the relationship of earlier phonological memory abilities to later language development. Methods: Tests of nonverbal ability, receptive vocabulary, grammar comprehension, digit span and nonword…

Previous research on typically developing children has shown that their memory for events depends on how they are encoded. As children grow older, they start to mention causal and temporal relationships between events, including psychological causes. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) were studied to disentangle the effects of…

Non-word repetition, in which participants hear and repeat unfamiliar verbal stimuli, is thought to provide a particularly sensitive measure of verbal short-term memory capacity. However, performance on this task can also be constrained by hearing and speech production skills, and by an individuals' linguistic knowledge. This study examined real…

"Drosophila melanogaster" is emerging as a valuable genetic model system for the study of mental retardation (MR). MR genes are remarkably similar between humans and fruit flies. Cognitive behavioral assays can detect reductions in learning and memory in flies with mutations in MR genes. Neuroanatomical methods, including some at single-neuron…

Understanding how memory works is important for success in school, for "all" students. One way for teachers to help students with disabilities learn about memory is to use picture books and then learn strategies. Picture books are useful for students with disabilities because these resources have moved beyond a means to scaffold early literacy…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of short-term memory and attention in time estimation. For this purpose we studied prospective time verbal estimation in 21 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and compared their performance with that of 21 matched normal controls in two different conditions: during a digit span task and during an…

We examined the contribution of working memory capacity to the development of children's reading comprehension. We present data from three waves of a longitudinal study when the children were 7 years (Grade 1), 8 years (Grade 2) and 9 years (Grade 3). Two questions were raised: The first question concerned the developmental changes of the relative…

The basis of young children's performance of judgments of recency and frequency was investigated using a modified version of Huppert and Piercy's [Huppert, F. A., & Piercy, M. (1978). The role of trace strength in recency and frequency judgements by amnesic and control subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 30, 347-354]…

Eye fixations were assessed during the reading of continuation sentences confirming inferences suggested by a preceding context sentence. In multiple regression analysis, individual differences in available prior vocabulary knowledge, working memory span, and speed of access to prior word knowledge served as predictors of eye fixations.…

In this article we suggest a method of evaluating learner expertise based on assessment of the content of working memory and the extent to which cognitive load has been reduced by knowledge retrieved from long-term memory. The method was tested in an experiment with an elementary algebra tutor using a yoked control design. In the learner-adapted…

In 2 experiments, bimanual 1:1 rhythmic coordination was performed concurrently with encoding or retrieval of word lists. Effects of divided attention (DA) on coordination were indexed by changes in mean relative phase and recurrence measures of shared activity between the 2 limbs. Effects of DA on memory were indexed by deficits in recall…

The authors examined the prioritization of abruptly appearing objects in real-world scenes by measuring the eyes' propensity to be directed to the new object. New objects were fixated more often than chance whether they appeared during fixations (transient onsets) or saccades (nontransient onsets). However, onsets that appeared during fixations…

In order to better understand the neuropsychological underpinnings of the relative strength in word identification in individuals with Down syndrome, the performance of children and adolescents with Down syndrome (N=29) was compared to the performance of a nonverbal-IQ matched group of children and adolescents with developmental disabilities of…