Phonological short-term memory and new word learning in children.

Sixty-five 5-year old children participated in 4 experimental tasks of word learning that varied systematically in the amounts of phonological and nonphonological learning required. Measures of the children's performances on 2 measures of phonological memory (digit span and nonword repetition), vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal ability were also obtained. Learning of the sound structures of new words was significantly, and to some degree independently, associated with aspects of both phonological memory skill and vocabulary knowledge. Learning of pairs of familiar words was linked with current vocabulary knowledge, although not with phonological memory scores. The findings suggest that both existing lexical knowledge and phonological short-term memory play significant roles in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words. The study also provides evidence of both shared and distinct processes contributing to nonword repetition and digit span tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory short-term memory and digit span: Normal versus poor readers.

Investigated the relationship between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse codelike temporal patterns in 3 experiments. Consistent with previous research on children, Exp I using 60 undergraduates demonstrated that Ss performed better when the 1st pattern was auditory than when it was visual or tactual. In Exps II and III with 36 undergraduates and 98 5th graders, respectively, no relationship was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones presented a few seconds apart. However, both tasks discriminated between children with normal and poor reading comprehension scores on a standardized test (Reading Comprehension subtest of the California Achievement Tests). It appears that these 2 tasks index fundamental processes that underlie reading comprehension. Digit span seems to assess an individual's ability to rapidly develop meaningful codes in memory for incoming verbal stimuli. The auditory pattern comparison procedure appears to measure ability to maintain information in short-term memory. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological working memory in very young children.

This study was designed to establish whether phonological working memory skills could be assessed in children below 4 yrs of age. A group of 2- and 3-yr-old children were tested on 3 phonological memory measures (digit span, nonword repetition, and word repetition) and were also given tasks that tapped other cognitive skills. Scores on the 3 phonological memory tasks were closely related. In addition, repetition performance was linked with both vocabulary knowledge and articulation rate. Results indicate that phonological memory skills can be reliably assessed in very young children by using conventional serial span and repetition procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in working memory and comprehension: A test of four hypotheses.

A relationship has consistently been found between measures of working memory and reading comprehension. Four hypotheses for this relationship were tested in 3 experiments. In the 1st 2 experiments, a moving window procedure was used to present the operation–word and reading span tasks. High- and low-span Ss did not differentially trade off time on the elements of the tasks and the to-be-remembered word. Furthermore, the correlation between span and comprehension was undiminished when the viewing times were partialed out. Exp 3 compared a traditional experimenter-paced simple word-span and an S-paced span in their relationship with comprehension. The experimenter-paced word-span correlated with comprehension, but the S-paced span did not. The results of all 3 experiments support a general capacity explanation for the relationship between working memory and comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults.

Four language sample measures as well as measures of vocabulary, verbal fluency, and memory span were obtained from a sample of young adults and a sample of older adults. Factor analysis was used to analyze the structure of the vocabulary, fluency, and span measures for each age group. Then an "extension" analysis was performed by using structural modeling techniques to determine how the language sample measures were related to the other measures. The measure of grammatical complexity was associated with measures of working memory including reading span and digit span. Two measures, sentence length in words and a measure of lexical diversity, were associated with the vocabulary measures. The fourth measure, propositional density, was associated with the fluency measures as a measure of processing efficiency. The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults is somewhat different, suggesting age differences in processing efficiency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is "working memory capacity" just another name for word knowledge?

This study is concerned with whether the correlation between complex working memory spans and reading comprehension occurs because the complex spans reflect the capacity of a structural working memory that plays a causal role in comprehension or because a 3rd factor, word knowledge, plays a causal role in both the span tasks and comprehension. If the latter hypothesis is correct, the correlation between word span and reading comprehension should be large when span is tested with low-frequency words but should not occur when span is tested with very familiar words. 90 college students were tested on a simple and a complex version of the word span task with high- and low-frequency words. The Verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test (VSAT) was used as a measure of reading comprehension. The correlation between span and VSAT was somewhat higher when span was tested with low-frequency words, but was significant with both low- and high-frequency words. This suggests that both word knowledge and a content-free working memory play a causal role in the relationship between word span and higher level cognitive tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's Reading Comprehension Ability: Concurrent Prediction by Working Memory, Verbal Ability, and Component Skills.

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit working memory), and component skills of comprehension. At each time point, working memory and component skills of comprehension (inference making, comprehension monitoring, story structure knowledge) predicted unique variance in reading comprehension after word reading ability and vocabulary and verbal ability controls. Further analyses revealed that the relations between reading comprehension and both inference making and comprehension monitoring were not wholly mediated by working memory. Rather, these component skills explained their own unique variance in reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory and aphasia

This study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension in aphasia. A measurement of working memory capacity was obtained using a modified version of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Task. Sets of sentences ranging in length from one to six words were presented to 22 aphasic subjects who were required to retain the terminal words following each sentence for subsequent recognition. The maximum number of words retrieved was used as an index of working memory capacity. Two versions of the task (listening and reading) were presented depending on the subjects' ability to read. Strong positive correlations were found between working memory capacity, reading comprehension, and language function. These results support the notion that the ability of aphasic individuals to comprehend language is predictable from their working memory capacities.     

Simple and complex word spans as measures of working memory capacity.

Five experiments investigated the effects of word length in simple word span tasks and complex operation and reading span tasks and the relationship between these tasks and reading comprehension. The 1st 2 experiments showed word length effects using both simple and complex memory span tasks and that both simple and complex span tasks correlated with reading comprehension. In the 3rd experiment, articulatory suppression did not eliminate word length effects. The final experiments showed that articulatory suppression eliminated the effect of word length when words were sampled with replacement from small fixed pools but not when sampled without replacement from a large pool. The word pool effects were not a result of concreteness of the words. It is concluded that the reading span does not measure a working memory specific to reading. Further, in immediate memory experiments, repeating words from trial to trial may lead to a more limited coding than is used with nonrepeated words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Relationship Between Age, Verbal Working Memory, and Language Comprehension.

A structural modeling approach was used to examine the relationships between age, verbal working memory (vWM), and 3 types of language measures: online syntactic processing, sentence comprehension, and text comprehension. The best-fit model for the online-processing measure revealed a direct effect of age on online sentence processing, but no effect mediated through vWM. The best-fit models for sentence and text comprehension included an effect of age mediated through vWM and no direct effect of age. These results indicate that the relationship among age, vWM, and comprehension differs depending on the measure of language processing and support the view that individual differences in vWM do not affect individuals' online syntactic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigation of functional working memory in the reading span test.

Two issues were investigated in 2 experiments: (1) the validity of a reading span test that combined a knowledge verification task with a secondary task of word memorization and (2) the hypothesis that word recall reflects the amount of working memory that is functional in reading. In Exp 1, the validity and reliability of the reading span measure were determined. In Exp 2, it was reasoned that if word recall reflected functional working memory in reading, then 2 results should be observed. The 1st predicted result was that prior exposure to sentences used in the reading span test would release working memory resources and improve word recall. The 2nd was that word recall, though correlated with general working memory and verbal knowledge measures, would add to these scores in predicting comprehension. Both sets of results were obtained, supporting the hypothesis that the reading span test measures functional working memory in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word knowledge and working memory as predictors of reading skill.

Three measures of working memory capacity and three measures of word knowledge were used as predictors of three different measures of reading skill. The results demonstrated that the size of a reader's vocabulary and the speed of accessing it are independent of a "depth" measure of word knowledge and that reading comprehension, reading speed, and text inferencing ability are all independent measures of reading skill. A series of regression analyses were conducted to derive a causal model of the three reading performance measures. The results indicated that working memory efficiency during reading was related to comprehension, whereas a more passive working memory capacity measure was related to reading speed. Moreover, text inferencing ability was related only to word knowledge. We conclude that concepts such as "reading skill," "working memory," and "word knowledge" are multidimensional constructs that cannot be captured by a single variable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship of reading achievement to verbal processing abilities.

Examined the relationship between reading achievement and ability to process verbal information in 67 achieving and 67 nonachieving readers drawn from 4th-grade classes. Verbal processing abilities were evaluated with 10 instruments, which included measures of memory span, associative learning, semantic association, automatic word processing, and time taken to name pictures, read words, and recode (pronounce) pseudowords. Achieving readers performed better on all measures except automatic word processing. Factor analysis yielded 3 factors, labeled Verbal Coding Speed, Memory Span, and Verbal Operations. Reading comprehension had high loadings on the 1st and 3rd factors but had a low loading on Memory Span. Results suggest that 1 primary component of the reading achievement of 4th-grade children is the ability to perform operations or manipulations on verbal material. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language skills of children and adolescents with Down syndrome: II. Production deficits

Hypotheses that children and adolescents with Down syndrome show (a) a specific expressive language impairment, (b) a "critical period" for language acquisition, (c) a "simple sentence syntactic ceiling" in production, and (d) deficit in grammatical morphology were investigated cross-sectionally. Conversational and narrative language samples from 47 children and adolescents with Down syndrome (Trisomy 21), aged 5 to 20 years, were compared to those from 47 control children aged 2 to 6 years matched statistically for nonverbal mental age. Children with Down syndrome appear to have a specific language impairment, compared to control children, in number of different words and total words (in the first 50 utterances) and in mean length of utterance (MLU). Total utterance attempts per minute were more frequent in the Down syndrome group. Narrative samples contained more word tokens, more word types, and longer MLU than conversation samples, for both groups. Intelligibility of narratives was significantly poorer for the Down syndrome group than controls. Analyses of narrative language sample by age sub-group showed no evidence of a critical period for language development ending at adolescence, nor of a "syntactic ceiling" at MLUs corresponding to simple sentences for the Down syndrome group. Omissions of word tokens and types were more frequent in the older Down syndrome than the younger control sample, matched on MLU.     

Development of adolescent reading comprehension in language 1 and language 2: A longitudinal analysis of constituent components.

This study investigated the relationship between reading comprehension development of 389 adolescents in their dominant language (Language 1 [L1], Dutch) and a foreign language (Language 2 [L2], English). In each consecutive year from Grades 8 through 10, a number of measurements were taken. Students' reading comprehension, their linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar knowledge) and processing efficiency (speed of word recognition and sentence comprehension) in both languages, and their metacognitive knowledge about reading were assessed. The relative strengths of the effects of these components of reading were analyzed to distinguish among 3 hypotheses about the relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension: the transfer hypothesis, the threshold hypothesis, and the processing efficiency hypothesis. The transfer hypothesis predicts a strong relationship between L1 and L2 reading comprehension and a strong effect of metacognitive knowledge on L2 reading comprehension, whereas the threshold and processing efficiency hypotheses predict a more important role of language-specific knowledge and processing skills. Results support the transfer hypothesis, although language-specific knowledge and fluency also contribute to L2 reading performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Younger and older adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences.

Off-line studies of younger and older adults' processing of syntactically complex sentences have shown that there is a consistent negative relationship between task performance and working memory for older adults. However, it is not evident from these studies whether working memory affects the immediate syntactic analysis of a sentence, off-line processes, or both. In the current study an on-line reading paradigm was used to examine the working memory capacity-constrained sentence processing model from M. C. MacDonald, M. A. Just, and P. A. Carpenter (1992). Working memory span, type of syntactic ambiguity (ambiguous vs. unambiguous), and type of syntactic ambiguity resolution (main verb vs. relative clause) interacted to influence younger and older adults' on-line reading times and off-line sentence comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Components of effective remediation for developmental reading disabilities: Combining phonological and strategy-based instruction to improve outcomes.

The efficacy of a combination of phonological and strategy-based remedial approaches for reading disability (RD) was compared with that of each approach separately. Eighty-five children with severe RD were randomly assigned to 70 intervention hours in 1 of 5 sequences: PHAB/DI (Phonological Analysis and Blending/Direct Instruction)?→?WIST (Word Identification Strategy Training), WIST?→?PHAB/DI, PHAB/DI?×?2, WIST?×?2, or CSS?→?MATH (Classroom Survival Skills - Math, a control treatment). Performance was assessed before, 3 times during, and after intervention. Four orthogonal contrasts based on a linear trend analysis model were evaluated. There were generalized treatment effects on standardized measures of word identification, passage comprehension, and nonword reading. A combination of PHAB/DI and WIST proved superior to either program alone on nonword reading, letter-sound and keyword knowledge, and 3 word identification measures. Generalization of nonword decoding to real word identification was achieved with a combination of effective remedial components. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language comprehension and probe-list memory.

Experiments were performed using probe-word recognition methodology in which participants read sentences that were presented 1 word at a time and were then shown a probe word and had to make a speeded response indicating whether the word had occurred in the sentence. One experiment showed that response times to probe words increased with the size of the set of candidate probes. The other experiments showed that the effects caused by name repetition in circumstances in which the repeated name was co-referential also occurred when the repeated name was not co-referential and when the order of words in a sentence was scrambled. The results suggest that responses in the task can be based on probe-list memory, a mental representation created to keep track of those words that the participant believes are likely to be probed, and that the use of the task to make inferences about language comprehension should be accompanied by controls ruling out such strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading in dementia of the Alzheimer type: A preserved ability?

Assessed 45 patients with a probable diagnosis of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), varying from minimal to moderate levels of dementia, on 3 tasks of reading aloud: (1) an extensive list of regular and exception words across a range of word frequencies, (2) the National Adult Reading Test (NART), and (3) a test of nonword reading. On the first test, the patients showed substantial effects of regularity, word frequency, and disease severity. Reading of less common words with atypical spelling-sound correspondences was significantly impaired in the moderately demented subgroup of patients and significantly correlated with measures of semantic memory for the patient group as a whole. This impaired exception word reading was attributed to the breakdown in semantic memory that occurs as the DAT disease process advances. A significant drop in performance on both the NART and nonword reading also accompanied increasing disease severity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)