Characteristics of Working Memory and Mental Verbs in Preschool Children

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of study was to examine preschool children’s attribute to understand mental verbs (emotion, cognitive) depending on their working memory ability. Methods: The participants were 45 children who were 5 years old. They were classified into groups: higher, intermediate and lower group, based on the results of a working memory task which included non-word repetition and judging whether a sentence was said with correct grammar. We analyzed their understanding of mental verbs and gave them mental verb comprehension task. Results: First, there was a statistically significant difference among the three groups in understanding mental verbs. Second, in examining the difference in comprehension between the two different types of mental verbs among the three groups, both emotional verbs and cognitive verbs showed higher understanding in the order of higher group working memory, intermediate group, and lower group respectively. Lastly, in analyzing the difference in comprehension of the two different types of mental verbs within the three groups; in the higher group, children performed better on cognitive verbs performed compared to emotion verbs; there was no difference in the intermediate group; and in the lower group, children performed better on the emotion verbs compared to the cognitive verbs. Conclusion: This study could be an indication of a shortage of capacity in comprehension or in processing those words due to poor working memory compared to the other groups that performed relatively better. Therefore, this suggests that there is a need to understand the importance of considering children’s working memory and improving it as we provide intervention for them, rather than solely focusing on vocabulary comprehension or expanding expression.