A central goal of research on short-term memory (STM) over the past 2 decades has been to identify the mechanisms that underpin the representation of serial order, and to establish whether these mechanisms are the same across different modalities and domains (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial). A fruitful approach to addressing this question has…

Previous work regarding a counterintuitive benefit of increasing distractors on episodic long-term memory (LTM) has suggested that retrieval of memoranda in working memory (WM) after attention has been distracted may confer benefits to episodic LTM. The current study investigated 2 conceptions of how this may occur: either as an attentional…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

"Patterning" is a cognitive intervention that is unknown to psychologists, but has nevertheless been taught for half a century in nearly all kindergartens and many preschools in English-speaking countries. Patterning is the understanding that a certain rule governs the sequence of items in a series. At the simplest level, if the series…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Fifty years of research has found great potential for peer assessment as a pedagogical approach. With peer assessment, not only do students receive more copious assessments; they also learn to become assessors. In recent decades, more educational peer assessments have been facilitated by online systems. Those online systems are designed…

Immediate serial recall of verbal material is highly sensitive to impairment attributable to phonological similarity. Although this has traditionally been interpreted as a within-sequence similarity effect, Engle (2007) proposed an interpretation based on interference from prior sequences, a phenomenon analogous to that found in the Peterson…

Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

The selection and ordering of response units (phonemes, letters, keystrokes) represents a transversal issue across different modalities of language production. Here, the issue of serial order was investigated with respect to typewriting. Following seminal investigations in the spoken modality, we conducted an experiment where participants typed as…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is…

Correct counting respects the stable order principle whereby the count terms are recited in a fixed order every time. The 4 experiments reported here tested whether precounting infants recognize and prefer correct stable-ordered counting. The authors introduced a novel preference paradigm in which infants could freely press two buttons to activate…

Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., precategorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the postcategorical properties (e.g., phonology,…