Background: Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) is associated with growth deficits and neurodevelopmental impairment including foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Difficulties with oral and written communication skills are common among children with PAE; however, less is known about how communication skills of adolescents who have PAE compare…

Sex differences in autism may in part be understood by an atypical sex profile of executive function and non-executive function. In this study, we compared females and males with autism against non-autistic individuals on neuropsychological and self-report measures to examine whether any sex differences in executive function and non-executive…

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by parental education and family income, is highly predictive of academic achievement, but little is known about how specific cognitive systems shape SES disparities in achievement outcomes. This study investigated the extent to which executive function (EF) mediated associations between parental…

The goals of this study were to adapt the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) into Arabic, to compare recall functioning among age groups (6:0 to 17:11), and to compare gender differences on various memory dimensions (immediate and delayed recall, learning rate, recognition, proactive interferences, and retroactive interferences). This…

Differentiating between early-onset bipolar disorder (BD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be difficult. Memory problems are commonly reported in BD, and forgetfulness is among the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. We compared children and adolescents with BD (n = 23), ADHD combined type (ADHD-C; n = 26), BD + ADHD-C (n = 15),…

"Everyday memory" is conceptualised as memory within the context of day-to-day life and, despite its functional relevance, has been little studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In the first study of its kind, 94 adolescents with an ASD and 55 without an ASD completed measures of everyday memory from the Rivermead…

The authors of this current study compared the memory performance of adolescent students with specific reading disabilities (RD) with that of typical adolescent readers on a newly developed verbal learning test, the "Bergen-Tucson Verbal Learning Test" (BTVLT). This multiple trial test was designed to measure memory acquisition,…

The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, which requires the free recall of the same list of 15 unrelated words over 5 trials, was administered to 21 high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 21 matched typical individuals. The groups showed similar overall levels of free recall, rates of learning over trials and…

Because of ongoing neuromaturation, youth with chronic alcohol/substance use disorders (AUD/SUD) are at risk for cognitive decrements during young adulthood. We prospectively examined cognition over 10 years based on AUD/SUD history. Youth (N = 51) with no AUD/SUD history (n = 14), persisting AUD/SUD (n = 18), or remitted AUD/SUD (n = 19) were…

This study examined conceptual relationships in semantic memory using an indirect priming technique in high-functioning autistic adolescents and controls. The autistic subjects and controls showed similar semantic priming effects. However, correlations with nonverbal cognitive measures for the autistic subjects suggests that semantic processing in…

Comparison of external memory strategies in 31 children (ages 11 and 17) with mild mental retardation and 64 children without mental retardation found no differences between children with mental retardation and their age peers in frequency of use of object-oriented strategies. For all groups, external strategies were used more frequently than…

Investigated were the abilities of 98 educable mentally retarded adolescents to encode and retrieve words using semantic and acoustic cues in a free and cued recall task. Available from: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 355 Chestnut Street, Norwood, New Jersey 07648. (CL)

The research literature on children's production of elaborations in associative learning tasks is reviewed, especially with respect to the questions of when children can produce elaborations under instruction, when they transfer elaborative strategy usage from one situation to another, and when they produce elaborative strategies spontaneously.…