Verbal transformation effect – an auditory imagery task equivalent to Necker's cube in visual imagery – recruits a specific working memory, the so-called articulatory or phonological loop. Is this mechanism sensitive to articulatory control constraints, i.e. phase relationships between vowel and consonant gestures? In our experiment, 56 French students repeatedly pronounced aloud non-sense syll...

The acquisition of reading and literacy skills in normal-hearing children has been found to be closely related to the development of phonological knowledge and the use of phonological processing skills. Phonological processing is often measured using a nonword repetition task in which a child relies on phonological knowledge and abstract phonological representations in order to decompose, encod...

The capacity to retain information for brief periods of time increases dramatically during the childhood years. The increases in temporary storage of speech-based material that take place in the period spanning the pre-school years and adolescence reflect complex changes in many of the different component processes, including perceptual analysis, construction and maintenance of a memory trace, ...

Recently, investigators have suggested that visual working memory operates in a manner unaffected by the retention of verbal material. We question that conclusion on the basis of a simple dual-task experiment designed to rule out phonological memory and to identify a more central faculty as the source of a shared limitation. With a visual working memory task in which two arrays of color squares...

The capacity of visual working memory was examined when complex objects from different categories were remembered. Previous studies have not examined how visual similarity affects object memory, though it has long been known that similar-sounding phonological information interferes with rehearsal in auditory working memory. Here, experiments required memory for two or four objects. Memory capac...

The association between music and language, in particular, the overlap in their processing results in the possibility to use one domain for the enhancement of the other. Especially in the preschool years music may be a valuable tool to train language abilities (e.g., precursors of reading). Therefore, detailed knowledge about associations between musical abilities and precursors of reading can ...

Phonological similarity effects were used to assess the role of acoustic coding in verbal complex span, a processing-plus-storage measure found to correlate significantly with aspects of complex cognition. Three experiments demonstrated consistent effects of phonological similarity on listening span. These effects appeared relatively insensitive to manipulations of task materials (Experiment 1)...

The aim of the present study was to assess the functioning of the different subsystems of working memory after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). A total of 30 patients with severe chronic TBI and 28 controls received a comprehensive assessment of working memory addressing the phonological loop (forward and backward digit span; word length and phonological similarity effects), the visuospatia...

objective: working memory is the ability of maintaining and manipulating the required information for operating generalization in future. the aim of the present research is to investigate the effectiveness of neurofeedback therapy on the working memory in children with adhd.  methods: 24 children with adhd who had the required standards to participate in the study were selected by accessible sa...

Doing long sums in the absence of complementary actions or artefacts is a multistep procedure that quickly taxes working memory; congesting the phonological loop further handicaps performance. In the experiment reported here, participants completed long sums either with hands down - the low interactivity condition - or by moving numbered tokens - the high interactivity condition - while they re...