The effect of working memory capacity on sequencing errors in child speech

Abstract

The current study investigated the effect of working memory on the distribution and other characteristics of sequencing errors in school-aged children’s production of sentence-length tongue twisters. Our goal was to understand the relationship between memory and speech planning in child speech. Working memory was assessed using subtests from the CTOPP (Wagner et al., 1999). Errors were elicited by asking 33 children (6-to-9-year-olds) to read different tongue twisters multiple times. Anticipatory and perseveratory errors were identified and categorized; strong and weak prosodic boundaries were also identified. Results showed that the children with larger working memory capacity produced significantly shorter prosodic phrases than those with smaller working memory capacity. Otherwise, the distribution and other characteristics of errors in the former group were more adult-like than those of the latter group: more errors toward the end of prosodic phrases (Choe and Redford, 2012); lower error rates (Wijnen, 1992); and more anticipatory than perseveratory errors (Vousden and Maylor, 2006). We suggest that these results are consistent with more structured speech plans in children with larger working memory capacity than in those with smaller capacity. [This research was supported by NICHD.]