Twelve cerebral palsied adolescents and young adults with complex communicative needs who used augmentative and alternative communication were studied. They were classified according to their working memory capacity (high vs. low) into two groups of 6 participants. They were also divided into two groups of 6 participants according to their high vs. low phonological skills. These groups were compared on their performance in reading tests –orthographic knowledge, a word test and a pseudoword reading test- and in the spelling of words, pseudowords and pictures' names. Statistical differences were found between high vs. low phonological skills groups, and between high and low working memory groups. High working memory capacity group scored significantly higher than low working memory group in the orthographic and word reading tests. The high phonological skills group outperformed the low phonological skills group in the word reading test and in the spelling of pseudowords and pictures' names. From a descriptive point of view, phonological skills and working memory, factors known to be highly predictive of literacy skills in people without disabilities, also hold as factors for the participants that used AAC in our study. Implications of the results are discussed.

The aim of this study was to present a new working memory test following the line of work started by García-Madruga et al. (2007) and to examine its relation to reading comprehension and propositional reasoning measures. In that study we designed a new working memory span test –based on Daneman & Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Test (RST)– in which the processing task called for an inferential decision –to resolve a pronominal anaphora based on Morpho-Syntactic cues– and had people recall the result of this inference. In the current study, besides the RST and the Morpho-Syntactic Anaphora test, we presented a new Semantic Anaphora measure. In order to check the validity of this new Working Memory (WM) task, we used the same reasoning task used in the previous study as well as a new reading comprehension test. The results show the tight relationship amongst working memory, reading comprehension and reasoning, and confirm the validity of the new WM measure.

El zolpidem es un agonista GABA(A) que está indicado para el tratamiento a corto plazo del insomnio. Investigaciones recientes proporcionan datos que indican que zolpidem produce déficit de memoria operativa (MO) espacial y dependencia; sin embargo, se desconoce los mecanismos subyacentes de estos efectos. Ya que el componente N400 auditivo de los potenciales evocados cognitivos (PEC) se considera como índice del uso de la memoria de procesamiento del contexto, el presente estudio se centró en la onda N400 de los PEC producidos durante una tarea de MO en un caso que sufría de dependencia de zolpidem. Los patrones de la onda N400 de ese caso se compararon con los patrones obtenidos a partir de controles sanos. Esta comparación reveló que la dependencia de zolpidem se acompaña por reducción de las amplitudes localizadas en las áreas cerebrales posteriores y prolongación difusa de la onda N400. Estos hallazgos pueden indicar que la dependencia de zolpidem manifiesta alteraciones con respecto al uso de la memoria de procesamiento del contexto, implicando o afectando a una red de amplio alcance de estructuras del cerebro.