Purpose: This experiment sought to determine whether children's increased susceptibility to nonsimultaneous masking, particularly backward masking, is evident for speech stimuli. Method: Five- to 9-year-olds and adults with normal hearing heard nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant targets. In Experiments 1 and 2, those targets were presented between…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

Does retrieval practice produce learning because it is an especially effective way to induce elaborative encoding? Four experiments examined this question. Subjects learned word pairs across alternating study and recall periods, and once an item was recalled it was dropped from further practice, repeatedly studied, or repeatedly retrieved on…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

Words presented to the right visual field (RVF) are recognized more readily than those presented to the left visual field (LVF). Whereas the attentional bias theory proposes an explanation in terms of attentional imbalance between visual fields, the attentional advantage theory assumes that words presented to the RVF are processed automatically…

Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Piraha (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6…

We report 2 experiments that tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) across training sets on the emergence of productive autoclitic frames (suffixes) for 6 preschoolers with and without language-based disabilities. We implemented multiple exemplar tact instruction with subsets of stimuli whose "names" contained the suffix "-er"…

Working memory (WM) processing in children has been studied with different approaches, focusing on either the organizational structure of WM processing during development (factor analytic) or the influence of different task conditions on WM processing (experimental). The current study combined both approaches, aiming to distinguish verbal and…

The purpose of this series of experiments was to evaluate the effects of mixed mand-tact arrangements on the acquisition of mands and tacts in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, the effects of three training arrangements (mand-only training, tact-only training, and mand-tact training) were investigated with 3 typically developing children.…

Recent interest has been drawn to the separate components of recognition memory, as studied by event-related potentials (ERPs). In ERPs, recollection is usually accompanied by a late, parietal positive deflection. An earlier, frontal component has been suggested to be a counterpart, accompanying recognition by familiarity. However, this component,…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

Verbal repetition is conventionally considered to require motor-reproduction of only the phonologically relevant content of a perceived linguistic stimulus, while imitation of incidental acoustic properties of the stimulus is not an explicit part of this task. Exemplar-based theories of speech processing, however, would predict that imitation…

Previous research suggests that language-training procedures for children with autism might be enhanced following an assessment of conditions that evoke emerging verbal behavior. The present investigation examined a methodology to teach recognizable mands based on environmental variables known to evoke participants' idiosyncratic communicative…