Background and Objectives: Many studies have been done to understand the nature and mechanisms of verbal short term memory. These studies have led to linguistic and nonlinguistic approaches to it. Phonological similarity effect as an important finding of these studies increased the conflict between both approaches. Regarding differences between languages, cross- language investigations may be helpful. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of phonological similarity on span of verbal short term memory in Persian language.Material and Methods: In this descriptive analytic study, 16 graduate and postgraduate students (mean age 20 years, SD=2.03) participated (4 males, remaining females). All participants were native Persian (monolingual) without any speech or hearing disorders. Stimuli were 450 words categorized in 3 different lists, namely rhyming words list, alliterative words list and dissimilar words list. Each list consisted of twenty five 6-words sequences (150 words in each list). Stimuli were presented via a speaker. There was a 1 second interval between words in each sequence. Three seconds after presenting each sequence a signal was heard as a sign to start the recall.Results: A one-way ANOVA test showed significant difference between rhyming, alliterative and dissimilar words (p= 0.0000). Poshtoc Tukey test showed significant difference between rhyming list and dissimilar list (0.000). Also a significant difference was shown between alliterative and dissimilar list (0.006). There was no difference between rhyming and alliterative lists.Conclusion: These data suggests that in rhyming and alliterative words, vowel, because of higher sonority (rather than other phonemes) enhances the memory span as a cueing feature.Cross-language differences, especially in phonemes sonority level may cause different phonological similarity effects among languages. Since verbal short term memory is sensitive to vowel in words, it seems that the verbal short term memory has a linguistic nature.

Background and Aim: Today, Bilingualism is a developing phenomenon which half of the world population is bilingual. Auditory system is the main route to language learning, so it is expected that bilingualism has an effect on functions of the auditory system. Auditory memory is one of the auditory processes which is a cornerstone of linguistic skills and learning process growth, so that, it has an important role in language learning. In this paper, functions of the auditory memory in monolinguals and precocious bilinguals have been investigated through dichotic auditory-verbal memory test.Methods: A cross sectional-contrastive study of the Persian version of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test has been carried out among 30 monolingual and 30 bilingual persons. The participants were chosen from both sexes in the age range of 18-30, and test scores have been compared in both groups and sexes.Results: Mean score of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test in monolinguals was 5.47 (from 10), with a standard deviant of 0.55, and in bilinguals were 7.52, with a standard deviant of 0.90, which statistically, it showed a significant difference in scores between the two groups (p<0.001). There was no significant difference among men and women’s scores in monolingual (p=0.06) and bilingual (p=0.10) groups.Conclusion: Results of this limited research showed that there was a considerable functional difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in dichotic auditory-verbal memory test.Therefore, it seems precocious bilingualism has a positive effect on the auditory memory.

Background and Aim: The dichotic auditory-verbal memory test (DAVMT) is useful in detecting auditory-verbal memory deficits and differences in memory function between the brain hemispheres.The purpose of this study was to prepare the Persian version of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test and to obtain its results in 18- to 25-year old normal individuals of both genders in Iran.Methods: The Persian version of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test like the original one consisted of 18 lists of ten words. The lists were arranged such that 10 words were presented to one ear, with the reverse words simultaneously were presented to the other ear, constituting a dichotic test situation.After preparing the 18 lists, content validity was assessed by a panel of eight experts and then, the words of each list were recorded on CD in a dichotic mode. Thereafter, it was performed on one hundred and ten normal individuals with ages ranging from 18 to 25 years (mean age: 21.3 SD 1.9 years) and the scores were recorded on a specially designed scoring sheet.Results: There was no significant difference between mean scores of 18 lists of the dichotic auditory-verbal memory test. The overall mean of CVI was 96% for the 18 lists and the mean score of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test was 6.5 SD 1.0 in the normal group.Conclusion: Based on the obtained results, the Persian version of dichotic auditory-verbal memory test has a good content validity and can be used in detecting the auditory-verbal memory deficits.

Nowadays, electricity is one of the most basic needs of human societies, such that almost all industrial operations and a large part of social, economic, and agricultural activities rely on this energy; therefore, the quality and stability of electrical power are important. In this study, we seek to forecast the changes in short-term load consumption concerning the factors affecting electric load, mainly weather changes, as well as the daily and weekly consumption fluctuations that have complex nonlinear relationships. It should be noted that the prediction of short-term changes in load consumption is an essential and critical factor in power distribution systems. The proposed method is a hybrid neural network based on deep learning, which trains with energy consumption data and real weather changes. This neural network is developed by combining CNN and LSTM architectures and optimized for configuration parameters such as the number of network layers and neurons as well as filter size. CNN and LSTM architectures have been utilized to extract existing patterns in data and to predict time series, respectively. The proposed approach predicts the pattern of future consumption by forecasting weather in the next hours and the pattern of electric load consumption in the past hours. Tensorflow framework is employed to implement the proposed approach, and the results are compared with similar state-of-the-art methods. The evaluation results show that the prediction accuracy is improved compared to the best available methods.

Introduction: Recent research findings about schizophrenia have shown that this disorder was associated with considerable cognitive and perceptual deficits, specifically in areas of attention and executive memory. The main aim of this study was to examine the executive memory and its dimensions in schizophrenic patients compare with normal individuals. Method: 30 schizophrenic male patients hospitalized in "Shahrood Psychiatric Hospital" selected using available sampling method, tested by revised version of WMS-III and compared by 30 normal randomly selected male individuals in same range of age and educational level. Results: Provided from MANOVA revealed significant differences between two groups in four subscales: orientation, control, visual memory and digits memory. Conclusion: Performance of the schizophrenics in conceptualizing and memory is lower than normal people. This finding is consistent by the hypothesis that schizophrenic patient suffers from a front-temporal lesion. Cognitive rehabilitation therapy seems to be necessary for these patients.