Previous studies of the development of phonological similarity and word length effects in children have shown that these effects are small or absent in young children, particularly when measured using visual presentation of the memoranda. This has often been taken as support for the view that young children do not rehearse. The current paper builds on recent evidence that instead suggests that ...

Whether rehearsal has a causal role in verbal STM has been controversial in the literature. Recent theories of working memory emphasize a role of attentional resources, but leave unclear how they contribute to verbal STM. Two experiments (with 49 and 102 adult participants, respectively) followed up previous studies with children, aiming to clarify the contributions of attentional capacity and ...

In this study we investigated brain activity characteristics of rehearsal processes in working memory using analysis of EEG coherence as a measure of synchronization of brain areas. In a delayed serial recall paradigm we enabled subjects to carry out rehearsal in one condition and disrupted it by irrelevant speech in another condition. Results show that rehearsalspecific changes of coherence du...

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...

Although much is known about the critical importance of active verbal rehearsal for successful recall, knowledge about the mechanisms of rehearsal and their respective development in children is very limited. To be able to rehearse several items together, these items have to be available, or, if presented and rehearsed previously, retrieved from memory. Therefore, joint rehearsal of several ite...

Difficulty with acquiring a second language is not by any stretch of the imagination an illness. Yet in some communities where social and political pressures to achieve proficiency in the mother tongue exist, those who are not facile in language acquisition experience suffering not dissimilar to what persons with a chronic illness experience: emotional pain, a sense of deficiency, restriction o...

This study examined the effects of model type and verbal rehearsal strategy in relation to motor sequencing of boys with learning disabilities (LD). Eighty boys, ages 7 and 8 years, were exposed to four experimental conditions in a 2 x 2 (Model x Verbal Rehearsal Strategy) design. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (a) visual-silent modellverbal rehearsal, (b) visual-verbal ...

Learning disorders (LDs) are diagnosed in children impaired the academic skills of reading, writing and/or mathematics. Children with LDs usually exhibit a slower resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG), corresponding to neurodevelopmental lag. Frequently, show working memory (WM) impairment, associated an abnormal task-related EEG overall activity (more delta and theta power, less gamma poste...

Several investigators have suggested that schizophrenic patients may show an increase in subvocal speech (as measured by electromyographic [EMG] activity) during auditory hallucinations (AH), and that the subvocal activity might be antecedent to the hallucinatory experience. The possible relationship between AH and subvocal activity guided the present approach to studying behavioral interventio...