In recent decades, the share of ethnically and linguistically diverse children enrolled in schools in the United States has exponentially increased. Despite the growing representation of ethnic minority and dual language learner (DLL) children, there is persistent evidence of early vocabulary gaps between low-income and DLL children and their…

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian-English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by…

In two studies, 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to name pictures of animals for the benefit of a watching hand puppet (the ongoing task) but to refrain from naming and to remove from view any pictures of dogs (the prospective memory [PM] task). Children also completed assessments of verbal ability, cognitive inhibition, working memory, and…

Purpose: Counting and exact arithmetic rely on language-based representations, whereas number comparison and approximate arithmetic involve approximate quantity-based representations that are available early in life, before the first stages of language acquisition. The objective of this study was to examine the impact of language abilities on the…

This study investigated relationships between SRL and EF in a sample of 254 school-aged adolescent males. Two hypotheses were tested: that self-reported measures of SRL and EF are closely related and that as different aspects of EF mature during adolescence, the corresponding components of SRL should also improve, leading to an age-related…

Executive functioning (EF) refers to a set of higher order, core cognitive processes that facilitate planning, problem solving, and the initiation and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. Although recent research has established the importance of EF for word reading development in early childhood, few studies have investigated the role of EF in…

A substantial body of evidence indicates that interpersonal trauma increases risk for adolescent and adult depression. Findings from 4 clinical trials for adolescent depression show poorer response to standard cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) among depressed adolescents with a trauma history than youth without such a history. This paper reports…

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) has a complex phenotype with more than 180 characteristics, including cardiac anomalies, cleft palate, intellectual disabilities, a typical facial morphology, and mental health problems. However, the variable phenotype makes it difficult to predict clinical outcome, such as the high prevalence of psychosis among…

Purpose: The capacity to update and monitor the contents of working memory is an executive function presumed to play a critical role in language processing. The current study used an individual differences approach to consider the relationship between memory updating and accurate reference to story characters in the narratives of typically…

Three kinds of knowledge usually recognised by epistemologists are identified and their relevance for curriculum design is discussed. These are: propositional knowledge, know-how and knowledge by acquaintance. The inferential nature of propositional knowledge is argued for and it is suggested that propositional knowledge in fact presupposes the…

The Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale (BDEFS), authored by Russell A. Barkley and published by Guilford in 2011, is an individually administered assessment tool that may be used to evaluate adults ages 18 to 81. The purpose of this measure is to screen those who may be experiencing executive functioning (EF) deficits in…

Educational philosophy in elementary and secondary schools has often centered on creating a "product," full of content knowledge and basic skills (Bagby, 2002). However, no longer is academic achievement in the classroom considered the sole gauge of lifelong success. Meltzer (2010) suggested that the development of executive functioning skills…

Recent evidence suggests that there are age-related neurocognitive implications for fragile X premutation carriers, including deficits in executive function, and that such deficits are more common in male than female premutation carriers. The purpose of the current study is to examine one aspect of executive function, language dysfluencies, in a…

Dysfunction in an execution/observation matching system, or mirror neuron system, has been proposed to contribute to the social deficits observed in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Atypical activity in this system, as reflected in attenuation of the EEG mu rhythm, has been demonstrated in several studies; however, normative patterns of activity…

Working Memory (WM) refers to a brain system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for complex cognitive tasks such as language comprehension, learning, and reasoning. WM also requires the simultaneous storage and processing of information. WM is directly related to academic performance in the classroom.…