Working memory and short-term sentence recall in young children

Abstract

The primary objective of this study was to investigate links between phonological memory and short-term sentence recall. Errors in immediate sentence recall were compared for children with relatively good and relatively poor phonological short-term memory skills, matched on general nonverbal ability. The results indicate marked differences in the overall accuracy of recall between the two groups, with the high phonological memory group making fewer errors in sentence recall. Although the frequency of the different types of errors (lexical substitutions and nonsubstitutions) differed significantly between the groups, the serial position profiles of sentence recall accuracy was similar. Both groups were also more likely to substitute target words with synonyms rather than unrelated words, a finding suggesting that mechanisms responsible for maintaining semantic information may also play an important role in performance of sentence recall tasks.