Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

Stage theories are prominent and controversial in science. One possible reason for their appeal is that they provide order and predictability. Participants in Experiment 1 rated stage theories as more orderly and predictable (but less credible) than continuum theories. In Experiments 2-5, we showed that order threats increase the appeal of stage…

Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high- and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists…

Verbal working memory (WM) tasks typically involve the language production architecture for recall; however, language production processes have had a minimal role in theorizing about WM. A framework for understanding verbal WM results is presented here. In this framework, domain-specific mechanisms for serial ordering in verbal WM are provided by…

Serial-order short-term memory (STM), as opposed to item STM, has been shown to be very consistently associated with lexical learning abilities in cross-sectional study designs. This study investigated longitudinal predictions between serial-order STM and vocabulary development. Tasks maximizing the temporary retention of either serial-order or…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

Despite a century of research, the mechanisms underlying short-term or working memory for serial order remain uncertain. Recent theoretical models have converged on a particular account, based on transient associations between independent item and context representations. In the present article, the authors present an alternative model, according…