Unpacking Direct and Indirect Relationships of Short-Term Memory to Word Reading: Evidence From Korean-Speaking Children

We examined the relations of short-term memory (STM), metalinguistic awareness (phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to word reading in Korean, a language with a relatively transparent orthography. STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN have been shown to be important to word reading, but the nature of the relations of STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN to word reading has rarely been investigated. Two alternative models were fitted. In the indirect relation model, STM was hypothesized to be indirectly related to word reading via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. In the direct and indirect relations model, STM was hypothesized to be directly and indirectly related to word reading. Results from 207 beginning readers in South Korea showed that STM was directly related to word reading as well as indirectly via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. Although the direct effect of STM was relatively small (.16), the total effect incorporating the indirect effect was substantial (.42). These results suggest that STM is an important, foundational cognitive capacity that underpins metalinguistic awareness and RAN as well as word reading, and further indicate the importance of considering both direct and indirect effects of language and cognitive skills on word reading.

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Behavioral and Brain Measures of Morphological Processing in Children With and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia From Pre-school to First Grade

Frontiers in Communication ◽

10.3389/fcomm.2021.655402 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

Author(s):

Natalia Louleli ◽

Jarmo A. Hämäläinen ◽

Paavo H. T. Leppänen

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Skills ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

First Grade ◽

Morphological Processing ◽

Preschool Age ◽

Rapid Automatized Naming ◽

School Age ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Age Reading

School-age reading skills are associated with and predicted by preschool-age cognitive risk factors for dyslexia, such as deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, letter knowledge, and verbal short-term memory. In addition, evidence exists that problems in morphological information processing could be considered a risk factor for dyslexia. In the present study, 27 children at pre-school age and the same 27 children at first grade age performed a morphological awareness task while their brain responses were measured with magnetoencephalography. Our aim was to examine how derivational morphology in Finnish language, and concomitant accuracy and reaction times are associated with first grade reading, in addition to the preschool age reading-related cognitive skills. The results replicated earlier findings; we found significant correlations between pre-school phonological skills and first-grade reading, pre-school rapid naming and first-grade reading, and pre-school verbal short-term memory and first-grade reading. The results also revealed a significant correlation between the pre-school children's reaction time for correctly derived words in the morphological task and the first-grade children's performance in rapid automatized naming for letters. No significant correlations were found between brain activation measures of morphological processing and first-grade reading.

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Hearing the Beat

Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.1525/mp.2016.34.1.56 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 56-70 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Kathleen M. Einarson ◽

Laurel J. Trainor

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Skills ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Superior Performance ◽

Auditory Stimuli ◽

Perceptual Sensitivity ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Phase Errors ◽

The Relationship ◽

Better Than

Adults can extract the underlying beat from music, and entrain their movements with that beat. Although infants and children are poor at synchronizing their movements to auditory stimuli, recent findings suggest they are perceptually sensitive to the beat. We examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment (adapting the adult task of Iversen & Patel, 2008). We also examined whether sensitivity is affected by metric complexity, and whether perceptual sensitivity correlates with cognitive skills. On each trial of the complex Beat Alignment Test (cBAT) children were presented with two successive videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex meter. One puppet’s drumming was synchronized with the beat of the music while the other had either incorrect tempo or incorrect phase, and children were asked to select the better drummer. In two experiments, five-year-olds were able to detect beat misalignments in simple meter music significantly better than beat misalignments in complex meter music for both phase errors and tempo errors, with performance for complex meter music at chance levels. Although cBAT performance correlated with short-term memory in Experiment One, the relationship held for both simple and complex meter, so cannot explain the superior performance for culturally typical meters.

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Short-term memory and working memory as indices of children's cognitive skills

Memory ◽

10.1080/09658210042000058 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 9 (4-6) ◽

pp. 383-394 ◽

Cited By ~ 52

Author(s):

Una M. Z. Hutton ◽

John N. Towse

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory

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The Effects of Training on Cognitive Capacity Demands for Synthetic Speech

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting ◽

10.1177/154193129403801819 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 38 (18) ◽

pp. 1229-1233 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Catherine Connolly Gomez ◽

Wayne Shebilske ◽

J. Wesley Regian

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processing ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Memory Load ◽

Working Memory Capacity ◽

Serial Order ◽

Cognitive Capacity ◽

Synthetic Speech ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Improved Performance

Previous studies have revealed that the perception and comprehension of synthetic speech may be attributed to increased processing demands in short-term memory as reflected in serial-order and preload paradigm tasks. Additionally, it has been consistently shown that the perception of synthetic speech improves with moderate amounts of training. The present study was conducted to determine if the increased perceptual effects of training for synthetic speech can be attributed to a reduction of short-term memory load. Two groups of subjects were tested with synthetic speech using the same comprehension and high cognitive processing tasks before and after training. One group was trained with synthetic speech and the other group acted as the control, receiving no training between the pretest and post-test interval. Results reveal similar increases in comprehension based on previous synthetic speech studies for the trained group. Moreover, these results suggest that training on synthetic speech promotes better allocation of attentional resources which result in improved performance on working memory capacity measures.

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Intervention Targeting Reading and Working Memory among Struggling Readers in Primary School

Medical Research Archives ◽

10.18103/mra.v9i11.2610 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (11) ◽

Author(s):

Linda Fälth ◽

Irma Brkovic

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Struggling Readers ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Word Reading ◽

Intervention Group ◽

Memory Training ◽

Control Group ◽

Specific Information ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory

Working memory is one of our core cognitive functions. It allows us to keep information in mind for shorter periods of time, allowing us to process and work with that specific information. In this randomized control trial, the effects of a training program that combine reading training and working memory training among struggling readers aged 8-9 were investigated. 30 pupils were included in the intervention group and 17 were assigned to the control group. The intervention group received a total of 60 training sessions divided into two eight-week training periods with a four-week pause in between. The results show that children in the intervention group improved significantly better than children in the control group on eight tests: Reading comprehension, Word decoding, Nonsense-word reading, Short-term memory, Working memory, Visuospatial short-term memory, Visuospatial working memory and Working memory for words. The effect was not confirmed for Sight word seeing.

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No Coincidence, George: Capacity-Limits as the Curse of Compositionality

10.31234/osf.io/cjuxb ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Steven M Frankland ◽

Taylor Webb ◽

Jonathan D. Cohen

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Function ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Visual Display ◽

Cognitive Capacity ◽

Common Source ◽

Cognitive Systems ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Capacity Limits ◽

Inductive Bias

In one of the most influential articles in cognitive science, George Miller (1956) describes his “persecution” by similarities in three cognitive capacity-limits: the number of items that can be held in short-term memory, the number of stimuli that can be ordinally ranked, and the number of items in a visual display that can be quickly and accurately reported. Although Miller wondered whether these limits owe to a common source, he ultimately concluded that the likeness was coincidental. Here, we challenge that conclusion. Cognitive systems face a tradeoff between maximizing the number of possibilities they can represent (maximizing entropy), and precisely fitting the data observed thus far (minimizing energy). Equipping a cognitive system with an inductive bias to maximize entropy on different timescales enables one of the hallmarks of cognitive function— efficient generalization— but leads to the limits in information processing that haunted Miller.

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Inferencing Skill and Attentional Control Account for the Connection Between Reading Comprehension and Mathematics

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.709944 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Young-Suk Grace Kim

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Attentional Control ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

First Grade ◽

Mathematics Performance ◽

Shared Resources ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

And Mathematics

We examined the relations of inference, vocabulary, decoding, short-term memory, and attentional control to reading comprehension and mathematics performance for first-grade students in the US (N = 83). The students were composed of 75% Hispanics, 15% Whites, and 6% Asian Americans. Students' performance on mathematics and reading comprehension were very strongly related (r = 0.88). Results from path analysis showed that inference (0.27 ≤ s ≤ 0.38) was independently and positively related to both reading comprehension and mathematics performance after accounting for short-term memory, attentional control, decoding, and vocabulary. Decoding was independently related to reading comprehension, but not mathematics, whereas vocabulary was independently related to mathematics, but not to reading comprehension. Attentional control was directly related to mathematics, and indirectly related to reading comprehension and mathematics via inference, vocabulary, and decoding, with a substantial total effect on reading comprehension and mathematics (0.56 respectively). Short-term memory was not directly nor indirectly related to reading comprehension and mathematics. Overall these results show that language and cognitive skills are shared resources of reading comprehension and mathematics, and highlight the roles of attentional control and inference skill in reading comprehension and mathematics.

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INFLUENCE OF THE NATIVE LANGUAGE ON SENSITIVITY TO LEXICAL STRESS

Studies in Second Language Acquisition ◽

10.1017/s0272263117000390 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 (1) ◽

pp. 151-178

Author(s):

Osnat Segal ◽

Liat Kishon-Rabin

Keyword(s):

Short Term Memory ◽

Reaction Times ◽

Metalinguistic Awareness ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Surface Level ◽

Arabic Speakers ◽

Stress Processing ◽

Nonnative Language ◽

Advanced Knowledge

AbstractArabic stress is predictable, varies across words, and does not have a contrastive role, whereas, Hebrew stress although nonpredictable, carries contrastive value. Stress processing was assessed in speakers of the two languages at three processing levels: discrimination, short-term memory, and metalinguistic awareness. In Experiment 1, Arabic speakers with Hebrew as L2 (n = 15) and native Hebrew speakers (n = 15) were tested on discrimination and memory of stress placements. Arabic speakers had fewer correct responses and longer reaction times compared to Hebrew speakers. In Experiment 2, the influence of nonnative language acquisition on metalinguistic awareness of stress was assessed. Arabic speakers (n = 10) were less able to identify stress in their native and nonnative languages compared to Arabic speakers with advanced knowledge of English and Hebrew (n = 10) and Hebrew speakers (n = 10). Our findings support the assumption that variations in stress at the surface level of L1 are insufficient to facilitate awareness and memory for stress placement.

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Reading alphasyllabic hindi: contributions from phonological and orthographic domains

Psychology of Language and Communication ◽

10.2478/plc-2018-0022 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 492-515 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Azizuddin Khan ◽

Purnima Bajre

Keyword(s):

Reading Fluency ◽

Phonological Processing ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Orthographic Knowledge ◽

Rapid Automatized Naming ◽

Future Research ◽

Short Term ◽

Reading Measures

Abstract Phonological and orthographic processing are important cognitive skills required in reading. The present study attempts to investigate the role of phonological processing and orthographic knowledge, in reading alphasyllabic Hindi orthography. The sample constituted 65 children from Grade 4. The result of hierarchical multiple regression indicated that the variance in reading fluency was significantly explained by phonological processing and orthographic knowledge measured through the tasks of rapid automatized naming, syllable deletion and dictation. The variance in reading accuracy was significantly explained only by orthographic knowledge measured through a dictation task. Phonological short-term memory showed significant correlations with all the reading measures but was non-significant in explaining the unique variance in reading. The limitation of the study and suggestions for future research is discussed.

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Investigation of the Influence of Phonological Awareness Intervention and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on the Enhancement of Rapid Automatized Naming and Verbal Short Term Memory in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

10.21203/rs.3.rs-712501/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Seyyedeh Samaneh Mirahadi ◽

Reyhane Mohamadi ◽

Bahar Arshi ◽

Jamile Abolghasemi

Keyword(s):

Phonological Awareness ◽

Outcome Measures ◽

Direct Current ◽

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Rapid Automatized Naming ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Memory ◽

Direct Current Stimulation ◽

The Mean

Abstract Phonological deficits include phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short term memory (VSTM). PA is defined as a conscious manipulation of the word subunits in word structure. Recently, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been used as a complementary treatment with PA intervention in the dyslexia treatment. In this trial we had both a PA intervention group and a PA + tDCS group in which the tDCS is applied over the left parieto-temporal area. It was hypothesized that the PA + tDCS treatment can improve RAN and VSTM. A randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled clinical trial was conducted to evaluate the influence of PA + tDCS intervention in improving RAN and VSTM. Twenty-eight participants were randomly allocated to the active (PA + anodal tDCS) or sham (PA + sham tDCS) groups. Each dyslexic student participated in 15 intervention sessions. RAN and VSTM sub-tests were assessed at the baseline, at the end of the fifth, tenth, and final treatment sessions and finally 6 weeks after the treatment. In both groups, mean scores of RAN sub-tests significantly decreased and the mean scores of the VSTM sub-tests significantly increased during, immediately and also 6 weeks after intervention. There was no significant difference between the two groups in the mean scores of the outcome measures. PA intervention leads to improvement in RAN and VSTM abilities in dyslexic students for a longer period of time. Combined intervention (PA + tDCS) had no further effect on outcome measures than PA intervention alone.

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