The short-term verbal memory performance of 19 children and young adults with Down syndrome (DS) was contrasted with that of two control groups. Results confirm the expected verbal short-term memory deficit in DS subjects and suggest that this deficit is specific to memory for verbal information and is not primarily caused by auditory or…

Analysis of the mean performance of 58 groups of normal adults and children on the free-recall trials of the Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test shows that the mean auditory-verbal learning of each group is described by the function R1+Sln(t), where R1 is a measure of the mean immediate memory span, S is the slope of the mean logarithmic learning…

The purpose of this study was to determine the latent structure of the California Verbal Learning Test--Children's Version (CVLT-C; D. Delis, J. Kramer, E.Kaplan, & B. Ober, 1994) in a sample of 175 children with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Maximum-likelihood confirmatory factor analyses were performed to test 6 competing hypothetical models…

The relationship between interactive play and the frequency of related responding to comments was investigated within the dyadic interactions between a language impaired 4-year-old and 4 normal language users. While the frequency of related responses was variable for the subject, the frequencies of related responses of normal children were…

Describes a study in which measures of musical ability (pitch, loudness, and rhythm), auditory discrimination, and memory were used to account for variance in attained English as a second language (ESL) oral proficiency. Proposes research programs to determine whether training in musical abilities might be useful to ESL instruction. (SED)

Two experiments explored the differential effects of two kinds of organization (taxonomic and schematic) on retrieval of information. (Author/PN)

Reviews and discusses experimental and observational research on the function of the social environment of the child in the mastery of syntactic regularities during language acquisition. Theories based on modeling, imitation, and reinforcement are addressed. A 73-item reference list accompanies the text. (Author/JL)

Children at three age levels (four-, six-, and eight-year-olds) were asked a series of class inclusion questions presented verbally, visually, and kinesthetically. Analysis of correctness of reasons showed main effects of age and of condition. (Author/GK)

Argues that mental images have functional properties similar to those of audiovisual media in that they can be intentionally and systematically used as the informational base for cognitive operations and as an aid to new learning. Experimental evidence is cited to support the claims. Nineteen references are cited. (Author/CHC)

Four experiments examined priming between newly learned paired associates through two procedures, lexical decision and item recognition. Results argue against a functional separation of the semantic and episodic memory systems. (Author/AM)

The effects of several factors on expended processing capacity were measured. Expended processing capacity was greater when information was retrieved from secondary memory than from primary memory, when processing was of a deep, semantic nature than when it was shallow and physical, and when processing was more elaborate. (Author/GDC)

Memory representations of statements from a story were predicted to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. It was shown that the recall of episode depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. The chunking idea was confirmed. (SW)

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie "The Red Balloon" in episodic structure. It relies partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components were located in the stories. Differences in content in movie and text recall are discussed. (SW)

Five experiments are described that detail both the structure of lexical representations accessed in visual word recognition and the method of parsing words in order to access these representations. The results support a system of lexical access that is not mediated by phonological encoding. (SW)

Experiment 1 showed that four-year-old children memorized a list of non-rhyming items better than a list of rhyming ones. In Experiment 2, bilingual children learned a list of items which had rhyming names in one language and non-rhyming names in the other. Results showed better performance on the non-rhyming items. (JMB)