Development of auditory memory span: The role of rehearsal

Abstract

Two experiments test the hypothesis that articulatory rehearsal causes the increase in memory span with age. This is an important issue, because, according to the working memory model, children as young as 4 years use rehearsal in memory span tasks. The developmental improvement is argued to be in the speed of rehearsal with age. However, other developmental evidence suggests that the improvement in span is actually due to an increase in the use of rehearsal with age. As most of this evidence is based on visual, not auditory, presentation, two converging approaches were used to test whether rehearsal was implicated in the age‐related increase in auditory memory span. Experiment 1 trained children aged 5, 7 and 9 years to rehearse, and Expt 2 prevented children aged 5–6 and 8–9 years from rehearsing. If rehearsal is the major factor in span development, training rehearsal should improve span in younger children more than in older children, whereas preventing rehearsal should reduce spans of older children to the level of those of younger children. In neither experiment did the effects of training or preventing rehearsal differ at different age levels. The results suggest that articulatory rehearsal is not a major factor in the development of auditory memory span up to the age of about 9 years.