Phonologically similar items (mell, rell, gell) are more difficult to remember than dissimilar items (shen, floy, stap), likely because of mutual interference of the items in the phonological store. Low-frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), guided by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to disrupt this phonological confusion by stimulation of the left inferior pari...

There is long-standing evidence for verbal working memory impairments in both children and adults with dyslexia. By contrast, spatial memory appears largely to be unimpaired. In an attempt to distinguish between phonological and central executive accounts of the impairments in working memory, a set of phonological and spatial working memory tasks was designed to investigate the key issues in wo...

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonologi...

The feature model of immediate memory (Nairne, 1990) is applied to an experiment testing individual differences in phonological confusions amongst a group (N=100) of participants performing a verbal memory test. By simulating the performance of an equivalent number of “pseudo-participants” the model fits both the mean performance and the variability within the group. Experimental data show that...

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic aware...

The nature of the relationship between language, working memory and auditory-verbal memory seems to remain unclear and classical language and memory models appear to view these skills as completely separate modules. Language processing models consider the existence of devices or buffers which store linguistic information. Levelt [1] describes a short-term memory device called the articulatory b...

The role of executive and phonological working memory resources in simple arithmetic was investigated in two experiments. Participants had to solve simple multiplication problems (e.g., 4 x 8; Experiment 1) or simple division problems (e.g., 42 / 7; Experiment 2) under no-load, phonological-load, and executive-load conditions. The choice/no-choice method was used to investigate strategy executi...

BACKGROUND The non-word repetition task (NRT) has gained wide acceptance in describing language acquisition in both children with normal language development (NL) and children with specific language impairments (SLI). This task has gained wide acceptance because it so closely matches the phonological component of word learning, and correlates with measures of phonological working memory, a defi...