Introduction. The ability of children to develop language harmoniously rests in large part on their capability to learn new words at a very fast pace and with minimal exposure. This capacity develops during their second year of life and depends on working memory and on existing word knowledge. According to the model of working memory proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974, 2000) as a framework to...

We report two case studies of aphasic patients with a working-memory impairment due to reduced storage in the phonological buffer. The two patients display excellent performance in phonological discrimination tasks as long as the tasks do not involve a memory load. We then show that their performance drops when they have to maintain fine-grained phonological information for sentence comprehensi...

Previous research has shown a systematic relationship between phonological working memory capacity and second language proficiency for alphabetic languages. However, little is known about the impact of working memory processes on second language learning in a non-alphabetic language such as Mandarin Chinese. Due to the greater complexity of the Chinese writing system we expect that visual worki...

Working memory means a lot in incidental vocabulary learning and retention. The present study examines the correlation between two types of working memory—complex phonological short-term memory—and from captioned videos. After conducting an empirical research to 125 young learners English as foreign language with tests: operation span test, which measured complex memory, non-word repetition mem...

Recent research has demonstrated that dyslexic children suffer impairments in both phonological skills and in working memory performance. In principle either a phonological deficit or a working memory deficit could underlie both sets of symptoms. This issue was addressed via a series of experiments designed to explore the relationships between dyslexia, age, phonological performance and working...

Novel word learning is central to the flexibility inherent in the human language capacity. Word learning may partially depend on long-term memory formation during the assembly of phonological representations from orthographic inputs. In the present study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined the contributions of phonological control-a component of the verbal worki...

The complex-arithmetic performance of three different populations was tested: Flemish-speaking Belgians; Englishspeaking Canadians; and Chinese-speaking Chinese participants currently living in Canada. All participants solved complex addition problems (e.g., 58 + 73) under no-load and load conditions, in which one component of working memory (either the central executive or the phonological loo...

Do established predictors of children’s arithmetic performance differentially predict performance on timed versus untimed calculation tests? We investigated phonological awareness (i.e., CTOPP), phonological working memory (i.e., digit span), and visuo-spatial short-term memory (i.e., Corsi blocks) as predictors of timed and untimed calculation, both concurrently in Grade 1 (N= 116) and longitu...

According to the working memory model, the phonological loop is the component of working memory specialized in processing and manipulating limited amounts of speech-based information. The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep) is a suitable measure of phonological short-term memory for English-speaking children, which was validated by the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetitio...