Abstract This study explores the hypothesis that the short-term phonological storage component of working memory may play a role in the acquisition of vocabulary by young children. In a longitudinal design, the vocabulary skills of 104 children entering school between the ages of 4 and 5 were tested and retested 1 year later. On both occasions, phonological memory was investigated by requiring a child to repeat back nonwords varying in length and complexity, while nonverbal intelligence and reading were assessed using standard tests. The phonological memory score was highly correlated with vocabulary at both age 4 ( r = .525) and age 5 ( r = .572), in both cases accounting for a substantial and significant proportion of the variance when all other predictors are removed by stepwise regression. Phonological memory at age 4 also accounted for a significant amount of variance in vocabulary score at age 5, over and above that accounted for by the vocabulary score the previous year. Although these relationships are necessarily correlational in nature, the data are certainly consistent with the view that phonological memory is involved in the acquisition of new vocabulary in children. Possible mechanisms accounting for this relationship are discussed.
Abstract Since the 1960s, there has been controversy as to whether long-term learning might depend on some form of temporary short-term storage. Evidence that patients with grossly impaired memory span might show normal learning was, however, particularly problematic for such views. We reexamine the question by studying the learning capacity of a patient, P.V., with a very pure deficit in short-term memory. A series of experiments compare her learning capacity with that of matched controls. The ...
The question of the relationships between segmental analysis abilities and alphabetic literacy acquisition remains confused in the literature. In this paper, it is argued ( 1 ) that segmental analysis ability does not develop without specific stimulation and that it usually appears when learning to read and write in the alphabetic system. After distinguishing between segmental awareSegmental analysis and literacy 435 ness and segmental analysis abilities. it is also argued that (2) segmental ana...
Three bodies of research that have developed in relative isolation center on each of three kinds of phonological processing: phonological awareness, awareness of the sound structure of language; phonological receding in lexical access, receding written symbols into a sound-based representational system to get from the written word to its lexical referent; and phonetic receding in working memory, recoding written symbols into a sound-based representational system to maintain them efficiently in w...
A patient with grossly defective short-term memory but fluent speech was studied in order to pinpoint the locus of the deficit. Her immediate memory for consonant sequences showed a clear phonological similarity effect with auditory presentation, but no effect of similarity when presentation was visual. She showed no effect of articulatory suppression and no effect of word length on span, both of which suggest that she was not using subvocal rehearsal. A further test showed that this was not due...
FIFTY-SIX first-grade children were administered measures of general intelligence, decoding speed, phonological awareness, and listening comprehension. All four types of measures were moderately related to end-of-year reading comprehension. Decoding speed accounted for the largest amount of unique variance. The hypothesis that reading is strongly related to general intelligence once differences in decoding ability have been accounted for was not supported. Other relationships among the variables...
The results of many studies suggest that early reading problems are associated with deficiencies in certain spoken language skills. Children who encounter reading difficulty tend to be deficient in the perception of spoken words, the ability to retain linguistic material in temporary memory, and the ability to comprehend certain spoken sentences, as well as in their awareness about the phonological structure of spoken words. This paper summarizes these findings and provides an explanation in ter...
Research into the memory deficit of retarded readers is examined within a working memory framework. Although much of the evidence in this area is confusing, there is fairly consistent evidence that reading retardation can be associated with a deficit in long-term storage of phonological information. This deficit may affect retarded readers' ability to utilize the articulatory loop, a short-term store which appears to play an important role in certain aspects of normal reading acquisition. On the...
Children who are backward in reading are strikingly insensitive to rhyme and alliteration1. They are at a disadvantage when categorizing words on the basis of common sounds even in comparison with younger children who read no better than they do. Categorizing words in this way involves attending to their constituent sounds, and so does learning to use the alphabet in reading and spelling. Thus the experiences which a child has with rhyme before he goes to school might have a considerable effect ...
A series of metalinguistic tasks, including segmentation and synthesis of words, were given to 143 children in kindergarten. The children were followed up in school where reading and writing achievement was assessed with several tests and ratings. A causal model was postulated concering the relationships between general abilities, metalinguistic competence, and reading and spelling skills. The quantitative implications of the model were worked out by path analysis, which revealed an orderly and ...
Abstract A key omission from many accounts of children’s early word learning is the linguistic knowledge that the child has acquired up to the point when learning occurs. We simulate this knowledge using a computational model that learns phoneme and word sequence knowledge from naturalistic language corpora. We show how this simple model is able to account for effects of word length, word frequency, neighborhood density and phonotactic probability on children’s early word learning. Moreover, we ...
This study reveals associative processes for novel words in a second language (L2) and their referents. Thirty Japanese participants learned associative pairs for novel words in Chinese and pictorial referents (CP), as well as novel words in Chinese and words in Japanese (CJ), against a condition in which they learned only novel words in Chinese (C). After the learning phase, participants conducted two learning condition retrieval tasks for word recognition and three recognition tasks for the so...
Last. Xinyi He(MGH Institute of Health Professions)
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Purpose Intervention provided to school-age children with developmental language disorder often relies on the provision of performance feedback, yet it is unclear whether children with this disorde...
Background and aimsPrevious research into word learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) indicates that the learning of word forms and meanings, rather than form-referent link...
Last. Gianluca Esposito(NTU: Nanyang Technological University)H-Index: 30
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This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related social-skills, chronological age, gender) on children's English-language development in phonological awareness (PA), receptive vocabulary (RV), and word reading (WR...
The purpose of this study was to examine potential differences in the predictors of expressive vocabulary development between children with Down syndrome and typically developing children to support preparation for intervention development. An age cohort of 43 children with Down syndrome and 57 typically developing children with similar nonverbal mental age levels were assessed at three time points. Linear mixed models were used to investigate the predictors of expressive vocabulary over time. B...
By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary develo...
Abstract The study explored the impact of task-related focus-on-forms (FonFs) (i.e., focus on spoken form and word parts) on EFL vocabulary development. A total of 130 English language students were randomly assigned to three different experimental conditions adopting a ‘comparison group’ design. In Group 1, the teacher taught the forty target words by giving their definitions (in the form of target language explanations) and example sentences wherein they were used; hence, the focus was on mean...
Aim of the study:The aim of this longitudinal study was twofold: first, to determine whether the relationship between working memory measures and language performance in young English language lear...