Borovsky, A., Elman, J.L., & Fernald, A. (2012). Knowing a lot for one’s age: Vocabulary skill and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 417–436

Main Concept

The article focused on finding out how the children and adults of different age responded to anticipated object described in a question-format experiment in an effort to find out how children were quick to learn language skills compared to their counterparts-adult. In an experiment, 48 children, 3 to 10 years of age, their eyes were recorded according to how they were fast responding to the sentence “The pirate hides the treasure”, and the same was done on 48 adults. The article concluded that incremental processing was crucial in language acquisition in both adults and children through the object-subject relations.

                                                              Problem Statement                                                             

The article was clear about its problem statement and it aimed to find out if the real-time spoken language had to be processed incrementally and in a relatively fast speed.

Hypothesis

There was a clear correlation between the problem statement and the article’s hypothesis. The authors’ hypothesized that listeners continuously used strategies to make expectancies about upcoming referents. Misyak, Christiansen, & Bruce Tomblin (2010) seemed to support this hypothesis and they argued that neurophysiological and behavioral techniques had shown that expectant generation was crucial in sentence comprehension in adults.

Methodology

The article used norming experiment to find out how adults and children stimuli responded to different objects including, a cat, treasures, bones and ship. The method did not provide a clear experiment for determining language development in children because subject-object relations could have been affected by other distractions around the adults which would have interfered with the result.

Findings

The experiment would probably indicate biased inferences and would not produce convincing results. Though the authors conducted an offline experiment to determine who well the children could identify the objects, it seemed that this experiment concentrated a lot on fast-track learning in adults and not in children. For example, the results showed that there were 20 incorrect responses in children and 4 in adults.

Suggestions for Future Research

The participants ought to use a better experiment such as using trace experiment to find out how the children demonstrate whir ability to describe the initial word that was mentioned under the imperfect listening conditions.

My Hypothesis for Future Research

Children develop language skills through memorization of words that are consistent with the expected actions.

 

Lervåg, M.M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic Review. Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 270 –291

The article sought to show that memory training programs was suitable for the treatment of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other children with other disorders. The meta-analysis showed that the programs had positive impact on verbal and non-verbal skills, word decoding and arithmetic’s for children with cognitive disorders.

Past research

Historically, researcher had found that the concept of short-term memory was significant in developing the cognitive functions of a child such as the digit span (Unsworth & Engle, 2007; Swanson, Zheng, & Jerman, 2009).

Hypothesis

Working memory training is effective both in children and in adults.

Conclusions

The meta-analysis showed that the training programs produced only near-transfer results; however, the results were not long-lasting.

Application to actual cognitive disorder situations

It seems reasonable to suggest that, true effects of these memory training programs are likely to be smaller compared to the effects of the current estimated meta-analysis.

Suggestions for Future Research

Memory training programs result in task-specific strategy effects and not cognitive development of children with cognitive disorders.

References

Borovsky, A., Elman, J.L., & Fernald, A. (2012). Knowing a lot for one’s age: Vocabulary skill

and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 417–436

Lervåg, M.M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic

Review. Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 270 –291

Misyak, J. B., Christiansen, M. H., & Bruce Tomblin, J. (2010). Sequential expectations: The

role of prediction-based learning in language. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 138–153

Swanson, H. L., Zheng, X. H., & Jerman, O. (2009). Working memory, short-term memory, and

reading disabilities: A selective meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42, 260 –287

Unsworth, N., & Engle, R. W. (2007). On the division of short-term and working memory: An

examination of simple and complex spans and their relation to higher-order abilities. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 1038 –1066