Echoic memory processes in good and poor readers.

Conducted 4 experiments to determine whether echoic memory plays a role in differences between good and poor readers. In Exp I, with 9 poor (mean age 11.05 yrs) and 9 good (mean age 10.9 yrs) readers, and Exp II, with 12 poor (mean age 10.85 yrs) and 12 good (mean age 10.7 yrs) readers, a suffix procedure was used in which the S was read a list of digits with either a tone control or the word go appended to the list. For lists that exceeded the length of the Ss' memory span by 1 digit (i.e., that avoided ceiling effects), poor readers showed a larger decrement in the suffix condition than did good readers. In Exp III, with 14 poor (mean age 10.64 yrs) and 14 good (mean age 10.83 yrs) readers, Ss shadowed words presented to 1 ear at a rate determined to give 75–85% shadowing accuracy. The item presented to the nonattended ear were words and an occasional digit. At various intervals after the presentation of the digit, a light signaled that the S was to cease shadowing and attempt to recall any digit that had occurred in the nonattended ear recently. Whereas good and poor readers recalled the digit equally if tested immediately after presentation, poor readers showed a faster decline in recall of the digit as retention interval increased. In Exp IV, using Ss from Exp II, bursts of white noise were separated by 9–400 msec of silence, and the S was to say whether there were 1 or 2 sounds presented. There were no differences in detectability functions for good and poor readers. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

There are at least two kinds of poor readers: Whole-word poor readers and recoding poor readers.

Current theories of reading are used to predict the existence of at least 2 subtypes of poor readers, and results from 3 experiments with 27 good and 13 poor readers (Primary Mental Abilities Test) from the 3rd grade support this claim. Recoding poor readers relied heavily on a sound-based code and on submorphemic units while reading single words, whereas whole-word poor readers did not. It is argued that only an individual-differences framework coupled with current theory is rich enough to characterize reading disorders adequately. (French abstract) (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship between digit span and anxiety.

The hypothesis was tested that WAIS Digit Span (DS) performance is disrupted by anxiety. 110 college students, who had been tested on Taylor's MA scale and Sarason's Test Anxiety Questionnaire, were tested under an anxiety-inducing or rapport-establishing (control) procedure. After testing on DS, experimental Ss were asked if the instruction variable had disturbed them. With respect to DS: (a) no-significant differences were found between experimental and control groups, but within the experimental group, those who were disturbed were inferior on DS to control Ss (p r = -.23, p r = .26, p     

Lexical memory in poor and normal readers: Developmental differences in the use of category cues.

Examined whether differences between poor and normal reading children on lexical memory tasks may be attributed to semantic development, using 80 2nd and 6th graders. Ss were presented with 4 lists of taxonomic categories and were asked to recall items under (a) noncued and random conditions, with Ss instructed to recall as many items as possible and (b) cued and blocked conditions, with Ss told to recall items in a category. All Ss performed better with category cues. Group differences on category recall were more reliable at Grade 6, suggesting that facility in accessing taxonomic categories may differentiate poor and normal readers more reliably at older age levels. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Two separate verbal processing rates contributing to short-term memory span

Previous research indicates that verbal memory span, the number of words people can remember and immediately repeat, is related to the fastest rate at which they can pronounce the words. This relation, in turn, has been attributed to a general or global rate of information processing that differs among individuals and changes with age. However, the experiments described in this article showed that the rates of 2 processes (rapid articulation and the retrieval of words from short-term memory) are related to memory span but not to each other. Memory span depends on a profile of processing rates in the brain, not only a global rate. Moreover, there appears to be only a partial overlap between the rate variables that change with age and those that differ among individuals.     

Pattern-analyzing disability in poor readers.

Conducted a study of 15 good and 22 poor readers (as measured by the Wide Range Achievement Test and the vocabulary portion of the WISC), to assess Ss' encoding of semantic and graphemic features of sentences. Ss were administered a test of recognition memory for sentences. The test permitted separate analyses to be made of the graphemic pattern-analyzing skills required in reading sentences and of a more interpretive skill. Both groups of children performed about equally on tests involving language use and grammar, but the poor readers were markedly retarded in aspects of the graphemic analysis (pattern analyzing) of the texts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal encoding effects on the visual short-term memory of learning disabled and normal readers.

Investigated the hypothesis that reading difficulties of learning disabled children are attributable to deficiencies in verbal encoding. Adopting a probe-type serial memory task, 60 normal and learning disabled readers matched on CA (9 yrs old), IQ, and sex were compared on recall performance after pretraining of named and unnamed stimulus conditions. The named condition for normal readers was superior in terms of recall performance. Consistent with the findings of F. Vellutino et al (1972, 1973, 1975), no difference was found in recall of nonverbal stimuli between normal and learning disabled readers. These data suggest that primary reading deficits in learning disabled children are related to verbal encoding deficiencies (visual–verbal integration) and not to deficiencies of visual memory, as suggested by the perceptual deficit hypothesis. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and digit span performance in emotionally disturbed children.

Administered the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale and a digit span task to 38 emotionally disturbed children in residential treatment. Results support the multidimensionality of trait anxiety, at least with emotionally disturbed children. The study also demonstrates the utility of identifying factors within an instrument and the importance of evaluating factor-specific scores. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial recall versus recall by categories in short-term memory.

C. G. Penney (1980) reported that serial recall of a list containing both auditorily and visually presented verbal items produced a lower level of recall than did separate recall of auditory and visual items. This finding was interpreted as support for the hypothesis that auditory and visual items are processed in separate streams in short-term memory, and that it is difficult to integrate these 2 streams into 1 sequence for rehearsal. The present study tested an alternate interpretation of the earlier results, the hypothesis that retention of order information is facilitated by S's being able to organize the list into 2 short sequences rather than 1 long sequence. Three experiments (72 university students) were carried out in which spatial location or category of stimulus material (letters or digits) was used to establish 2 types of items. Total recall from a list did not differ significantly between the serial and category recall conditions. Results rule out the organizational interpretation of the bisensory experiment and, therefore, provide indirect support for the separate streams hypothesis. (French abstract) (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory event-related potentials, auditory digit span, and clinical symptoms in chronic schizophrenic men on neuroleptic medication

The Intervet Symposium 'Control and Regulation of Folliculogenesis' took place at the Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Fertility in University College, Dublin in July, 1995. Five papers were presented, of which abstracts have been published. Discussion centred on monotocous species and principally addressed the question 'How is the ovulatory follicle selected and nurtured?' Many follicles start to develop simultaneously, but most become atretic. During the luteal phase of the cycle, several waves of follicles are initiated, and although one in each wave gains dominance, all ultimately atrophy. The dominant follicle in the wave produced towards the end of the luteal phase ovulates. The biochemical characteristics of dominant and subordinate follicles were contrasted, and the endocrine environment in which they waxed and waned was analysed. Interaction of autocrine and paracrine effectors, principally with FSH, LH and their receptors, ultimately determines follicular destiny.     

Syntax and retention in good and poor readers.

The purpose of the experiment was to discover whether syntactic structure facilitates recall in good readers and whether this effect exists in children who are poor readers. A paired-associate task equated the two groups on their ability to associate words. Each child was taught with a tape recorder four sentences, composed of nonsense elements; two of which were syntactically structured, the other two unstructured. The good readers learned the structured sentences more rapidly than the unstructured sentences. The poor readers learned both kinds of sentences with equal facility. There was no difference between the good readers' and the poor readers' ability to retain the unstructured material. Hence, the locus of the facilitation effect lies in the syntactic cues, implicit in the structured lists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory memory for timbre.

Psychophysical studies are reported examining how the context of recent auditory stimulation may modulate the processing of new sounds. The question posed is how recent tone stimulation may affect ongoing performance in a discrimination task. In the task, two complex sounds occurred in successive intervals. A single target component of one complex was decreased (Experiments 1 and 2) or increased (Experiments 3, 4, and 5) in intensity on half of trials: The task was simply to identify those trials. Prior to each trial, a pure tone inducer was introduced either at the same frequency as the target component or at the frequency of a different component of the complex. Consistent with a frequency-specific form of disruption, discrimination performance was impaired when the inducing tone matched the frequency of the following decrement or increment. A timbre memory model (TMM) is proposed incorporating channel-specific interference allied to inhibition of attending in the coding of sounds in the context of memory traces of recent sounds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Idiosyncratic response patterns among good and poor readers.

Reading skill is considered to be a function of the match of S's response-elaboration patterns to the available cues scanned from the material. It was postulated that poor readers typically respond less consensually than good readers and that both groups make more errors on material which is designed to evoke idiosyncratic patterns of responding. It was found that both good (N = 24) and poor readers (N = 24) in the 5th grade made more errors on stories written in a here-and-now context than on stories in a past-and-far away context; for stories which included affective content, only poor readers showed increases in errors. The poor readers also made fewer consensual responses than did the good readers on a story-completion task and a word-association task. Implications for the reeducation of poor readers were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial order ability in good and poor readers.

Tested a poor reading group (16 4th graders, 2 yr. behind their appropriate reading level) and a good reading group (16 4th graders with average reading scores between the 33rd and 70th percentiles) on sequencing and nonsequencing tests in the auditory, visual, and tactual modes. No differences were found between the performance of good and poor reader groups on the ability to sequence. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual vs. linguistic sequencing abilities. (French summary) (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Complex span versus updating tasks of working memory: The gap is not that deep.

How to best measure working memory capacity is an issue of ongoing debate. Besides established complex span tasks, which combine short-term memory demands with generally unrelated secondary tasks, there exists a set of paradigms characterized by continuous and simultaneous updating of several items in working memory, such as the n-back, memory updating, or alpha span tasks. With a latent variable analysis (N = 96) based on content-heterogeneous operationalizations of both task families, the authors found a latent correlation between a complex span factor and an updating factor that was not statistically different from unity (r = .96). Moreover, both factors predicted fluid intelligence (reasoning) equally well. The authors conclude that updating tasks measure working memory equally well as complex span tasks. Processes involved in building, maintaining, and updating arbitrary bindings may constitute the common working memory ability underlying performance on reasoning, complex span, and updating tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

WAIS digit span differences between prisoners and psychiatric patients

37 prisoners tended to exceed 29 psychiatric patients in having WAIS Digit Sapn scaled scores higher than the mean of their 5 other Verbal scaled scores. MMPI T scores were slightly to moderately inversely related to Digit Span performance.     

Category-order effects in memory span.

When Ss are required to recall lists containing both words and digits, memory span is higher when the digits precede the words than when the words precede the digits. In Exp 1, both forward and backward recall were tested; it was demonstrated that this category-order effect reflects the input position, and not the output position, of the items. Exp 2 revealed that this effect was not eliminated by a filled retention interval. Exp 3 showed that the effect was eliminated when lists were presented at a fast presentation rate. In Exp 4, the effect was eliminated when Ss engaged in articulatory suppression. A 5th experiment extended the findings of Exp 4 to the case in which lists are composed of semantically related or unrelated words. These results suggest that category-order effects reflect mnemonic activity that Ss engage in during list presentation and do not arise from structural characteristics of the memory system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Forward and backward digit span interaction with race and IQ: Predictions from Jensen's theory.

From A. Jensen's 1969 2-level theory of mental disabilities (Level I: rote learning and memory; Level II: complex cognitive processing) it was predicted that forward digit span (FDS) should correlate less with IQ than backward digit span (BDS), and age and race should interact with FDS-BDS, with the FDS-BDS difference decreasing as a junction of age and a greater White-Black difference in BDS than in FDS. The predictions were substantiated at a high level of significance in large representative samples of 669 White and 622 Black 5-12 yr olds who were given the revised WISC. Socioeconomic differences accounted for less of the predicted effects than race. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements and the perceptual span in older and younger readers.

The size of the perceptual span (or the span of effective vision) in older readers was examined with the moving window paradigm (G. W. McConkie & K. Rayner, 1975). Two experiments demonstrated that older readers have a smaller and more symmetric span than that of younger readers. These 2 characteristics (smaller and more symmetric span) of older readers may be a consequence of their less efficient processing of nonfoveal information, which results in a riskier reading strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

P300 latency and memory span development.

The rapid increase of memory span with development has been attributed to increases in the efficiency with which children can process the items to be remembered. To test this hypothesis, WAIS Digit Span and latency from the P300 component of the event-related brain potential—a measure of stimulus evaluation time independent of response production—were obtained from 24 5–14 yr olds and 24 20–40 yr olds. Increases in digit span were associated with decreases in peak latency for children but not for adults. This finding was obtained even when S age was statistically removed, and it suggests that immediate memory development is tightly coupled with decreases in speed of stimulus identification. Implications for theories of memory development are discussed. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)