Auditory Visual Reaction Time Research Articles

Role of working memory in children's understanding spoken narrative: A preliminary investigation

ABSTRACTThe role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM), attentional resource capacity/allocation, and processing speed on children's spoken narrative comprehension was investigated. Sixty-seven children (6–11 years) completed a digit span task (PSTM), concurrent verbal processing and storage (CPS) task (resource capacity/allocation), auditory–visual reaction time (AVRT) task (processing speed), and the Test of Narrative Language. Correlation and regression analyses examined the association between the memory variables and comprehension. The main findings were (a) CPS and AVRT correlated with comprehension and (b) after accounting for age, CPS accounted for a significant 7.9% of unique variance and AVRT accounted for another significant 5.2%. The results indicate that resource capacity/allocation and processing speed are important to children's ability to understand spoken narrative.

Role of Working Memory in Typically Developing Children’s Complex Sentence Comprehension

The influence of three mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory (PSTM capacity), attentional resource control/allocation, and processing speed) on children's complex (and simple) sentence comprehension was investigated. Fifty two children (6-12 years) completed a nonword repetition task (indexing PSTM), concurrent verbal processing-storage task (indexing resource control/allocation), auditory-visual reaction time (RT) task (indexing processing speed), and a sentence comprehension task that included complex and simple sentences. Correlation and regression analyses were run to determine the association between the memory variables and sentence comprehension accuracy. Results revealed: (1) none of the memory variables correlated with simple sentence comprehension, (2) resource control/allocation and processing speed correlated significantly with complex sentence comprehension, even after covarying for age, and (3) attentional functioning and processing speed predicted complex sentence comprehension (after accounting for age). Results were interpreted to suggest that working memory is significantly involved in school age children's comprehension of familiar complex sentence structures.