Three experiments were conducted to examine the effect of phonological similarity in simple and complex memory span tasks. In Experiment 1, participants performed either a simple or a complex span task, and the memoranda within lists were either phonologically similar or distinct. Phonologically similar lists consisted of words that rhymed.The simple span task was word span. There were two comp...

Genetic and environmental influences on cognitive components of reading span in 345 middle-aged male twin pairs were examined. Shared variance among word recognition (reading only), digits forward (short-term memory only), and reading span (concurrent reading plus memory) was almost entirely mediated by common genetic influences. Overall heritability was .52 for word recognition, .27 for digits...

The Operation Span Test (OSPAN) is widely used to assess working memory capacity. However, this instrument has been rarely used to test Japanese participants because its task was not sufficiently difficult. The mean score for the original computerized OSPAN often reached a ceiling when Japanese participants were tested. In this study, we developed a computerized version of OSPAN for Japanese pa...

That phonologically similar words in a short-term memory test are more difficult to recall than phonologically dissimilar words is a well-known phenomenon. This effect is the phonological similarity decrement. In the present study, we examined whether this phonological similarity decrement is present when additional semantic information is available, as in a reading span test, as compared with ...

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis was found to successfully account for variability in developmental dyslexia [Bosse, M.L., Tainturier, M.J. & Valdois, S. (2007), Developmental dyslexia: The visual attention span hypothesis. Cognition, 104, 198-230]. We conducted here a cross-sectional study on 417 typically developing children from first, third and fifth grades examining the ro...

The visual span in reading is the number of characters that can be recognized at a glance. The shrinking visual span hypothesis attributes reading deficits in low vision, and slow reading in normal vision at low contrast, to a reduction in the visual span. This hypothesis predicts that reading time (msec/word) becomes increasingly dependent on word length as text contrast decreases. We tested a...