Verbal short-term memory deficits are a common characteristic of children with reading problems and may markedly increase the difficulty of learning to read. Previous work suggests that the basis of the short-term memory deficit may involve limitations in phonetic coding. In the present paper, a series of experiments are reviewed which examined the role of phonological processes in short-term m...

In this study, we explored capacities for three different aspects of short-term verbal memory in patients with semantic dementia. As expected, the two patients had poor recall for lexicosemantic item information, as assessed by immediate serial recall of word lists. In contrast, their short-term memory for phonological information was preserved, as evidenced by normal performance for immediate ...

Illiteracy remains a world-wide problem not only for children but also for adults. Phonological processing has been defined as a crucial factor for the acquisition of written language, which usually occurs in childhood. However, it is unclear to what extent phonological processing is necessary in order for adults to acquire written language skills. We tested 47 illiterate adults before and afte...

In testing the hypothesis that surface phonetic form is included in short-term memory (STM) representation, the tone sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese was exploited, and, as a prerequisite, the hypothesis that tonal similarity affects STM of verbal material in a tone language was also tested. In Experiment 1, subjects recalled visually presented sequences of seven monosyllabic Chinese morph...

Introduction: Previous studies have shown that exercise enhances cognitive and functional capacities in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we investigated the effect of long-term (60 days) and short- term (10 days) exercise on the spatial memory deficits in an animal model of AD. Methods: Fifty male rats were divided into 5 groups 1) intact, 2) sham, 3) sham-Alzheimer 4) ...

Neuropsychological reports and activation studies by means of positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging have suggested that the neural correlates of phonological short-term memory are located in the left hemisphere, with Brodmann's area (BA) 40 being responsible for short-term storage, and BA 44 for articulatory rehearsal. However, a careful review of the literature...

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a common developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in language acquisition despite otherwise normal development and in the absence of any obvious explanatory factors. We performed a high-density screen of SLI1, a region of chromosome 16q that shows highly significant and consistent linkage to nonword repetition, a measure of phonological short-te...