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Purpose: Recent behavioral studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing retrieval practice into learning tasks for children. Such approaches have revealed that repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) is particularly effective in promoting children's learning of word form and meaning information. This study further examines how retrieval practice enhances learning of word meaning information at the behavioral and neural levels. Method: Twenty typically developing preschool children were taught novel words using an RSR learning schedule for some words and an immediate retrieval (IR) learning schedule for other words. In addition to the label, children were taught two arbitrary semantic features for each item. Following the teaching phase, children's learning was tested using recall tests. In addition, during the 1-week follow-up, children were presented with pictures and an auditory sentence that correctly labeled the item but stated correct or incorrect semantic information. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were time locked to the onset of the words noting the semantic feature. Children provided verbal judgments of whether the semantic feature was correctly paired with the item. Results: Children recalled more labels and semantic features for items that had been taught in the RSR learning schedule relative to the IR learning schedule. ERPs also differentiated the learning schedules. Mismatching label--meaning pairings elicited an N400 and late positive component (LPC) for both learning conditions; however, mismatching RSR pairs elicited an N400 with an earlier onset and an LPC with a longer duration, relative to IR mismatching label--meaning pairings. These ERP timing differences indicated that the children were more efficient in processing words that were taught in the RSR schedule relative to the IR learning schedule. Conclusions: Spaced retrieval practice promotes learning of both word form and meaning information. The findings lay the necessary groundwork for better understanding of processing newly learned semantic information in preschool children. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15063060 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The nature of the relationship between memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has been unclear. We present a novel perspective that highlights the relational influences of fluid intelligence, controlled attention, working memory (WM), and long-term memory (LTM) on sentence comprehension in children with and without DLD. This perspective has new and important implications for theory, assessment, and intervention. Method: We review a large-scale study of children with and without DLD that focused on the connections between cognition, memory, and sentence comprehension. We also summarize a new model of these relationships. Results: Our new model suggests that WM serves as a conduit through which syntactic knowledge in LTM, controlled attention, and general pattern recognition indirectly influence sentence comprehension in both children with DLD and typically developing children. For typically developing children, language-based LTM and fluid intelligence indirectly influence sentence comprehension. However, for children with DLD, controlled attention plays a larger indirect role. Conclusions: WM plays a key role in children's ability to apply their syntactic knowledge when comprehending canonical and noncanonical sentences. Our new model has important implications for the assessment of sentence comprehension and for the treatment of larger sentence comprehension deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous research into the working, declarative, and procedural memory systems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has yielded inconsistent results. The purpose of this research was to profile these memory systems in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Method: One hundred four 5- to 8-year-old children participated in the study. Fifty had DLD, and 54 were typically developing. Aspects of the working memory system (verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, and visual--spatial short-term memory) were assessed using a nonword repetition test and subtests from the Working Memory Test Battery for Children. Verbal and visual--spatial declarative memory were measured using the Children's Memory Scale, and an audiovisual serial reaction time task was used to evaluate procedural memory. Results: The children with DLD demonstrated significant impairments in verbal short-term and working memory, visual--spatial short-term memory, verbal declarative memory, and procedural memory. However, verbal declarative memory and procedural memory were no longer impaired after controlling for working memory and nonverbal IQ. Declarative memory for visual--spatial information was unimpaired. Conclusions: These findings indicate that children with DLD have deficits in the working memory system. While verbal declarative memory and procedural memory also appear to be impaired, these deficits could largely be accounted for by working memory skills. The results have implications for our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying language impairment in the DLD population; however, further investigation of the relationships between the memory systems is required using tasks that measure learning over long-term intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The storage-only deficit and joint mechanism deficit hypotheses are 2 possible explanations of the verbal working memory (vWM) storage capacity limitation of school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We assessed the merits of each hypothesis in a large group of children with DLD and a group of same-age typically developing (TD) children. Method: Participants were 117 children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched TD children 7–11 years of age. Children completed tasks indexing vWM capacity, verbal short-term storage, sustained attention, attention switching, and lexical long-term memory (LTM). Results: For the DLD group, all of the mechanisms jointly explained 26.5% of total variance. Storage accounted for the greatest portion (13.7%), followed by controlled attention (primarily sustained attention; 6.5%) and then lexical LTM (5.6%). For the TD group, all 3 mechanisms together explained 43.9% of total variance. Storage accounted for the most variance (19.6%), followed by lexical LTM (16.0%), sustained attention (5.4%), and attention switching (3.0%). There was a significant LTM × Group interaction, in which stronger LTM scores were associated with significantly higher vWM capacity scores for the TD group as compared to the DLD group. Conclusions: Results support a joint mechanism deficit account of the vWM capacity limitation of children with DLD. Results provide substantively new insights into the underlying factors of the vWM capacity limitation in DLD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Scholars have long noted that retention improves significantly when learners frequently test themselves on the new material rather than engage in continuous study with no intermittent testing. In this study, we apply the notion of repeated testing or retrieval to the process of word learning in preschool-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Novel words and their meanings were taught to 10 children with DLD and 10 typically developing (TD) children matched on age (DLD, M = 63.4 months; TD, M = 63.2 months). Recall was assessed immediately after the 2nd learning session and then again 1 week later. Results: Both groups showed better retention when they had attempted to retrieve the words during the learning period than when they had simply listened to and studied the words paired with their referents. Relative to their TD peers, the children with DLD seemed to be weaker in their encoding, but these children's retention over a 1-week period was indistinguishable from that of their age mates. Conclusion: Word learning activities that include opportunities for repeated retrieval appear to significantly benefit retention relative to more traditional word learning activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study explored the effects of 2 different training structures on the implicit acquisition of a sequence in a serial reaction time (SRT) task in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: All of the children underwent 3 training sessions, followed by a retention session 2 weeks after the last session. In the massed-training condition, the 3 training sessions were in immediate succession on 1 day, whereas in the distributedtraining condition, the 3 training sessions were spread over a 1-week period in an expanding schedule format. Results: Statistical analyses showed that the children with normal language were unaffected by the training conditions, performing the SRT task similarly in both training conditions. The children with SLI, however, were affected by the training structure, performing the SRT task better when the training sessions were spaced over time rather than clustered on 1 day. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that although intensive training does not increase learning in children with SLI, distributing training sessions over time does increase learning. The implications of these results on the learning abilities of children with SLI are discussed, as are the mechanisms involved in massed versus distributed learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to introduce the LSHSS Clinical Forum: Working Memory in School-Age Children. All the articles in this clinical forum concern the nature of working memory and its relationship to language and academic skills. Method: The introduction provides a basic overview of working memory and its importance for explicit and implicit learning and highlights the topics of the 8 articles that comprise the clinical forum. Conclusion: The articles in this clinical forum provide readers with important information about the current state of our understanding of working memory and its importance for understanding the language and academic skills of school-age children developing typically and those with language and learning difficulties. Articles in this forum also address the practical implications of this knowledge for assessment and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study explored whether measures of working memory ability contribute to the wide variation in 2-year-olds' expressive vocabulary skills. Method: Seventy-nine children (aged 24-30 months) were assessed by using standardized tests of vocabulary and visual cognition, a processing speed measure, and behavioral measures of verbal working memory and phonological short-term memory. Results: Strong correlations were observed between phonological short-term memory, verbal working memory, and expressive vocabulary. Speed of spoken word recognition showed a moderate significant correlation with expressive vocabulary. In a multivariate regression model for expressive vocabulary, the most powerful predictor was a measure of phonological short-term memory (accounting for 66% unique variance), followed by verbal working memory (6%), sex (2%), and age (1 %). Processing speed did not add significant unique variance. Conclusions: These findings confirm previous research positing a strong role for phonological short-term memory in early expressive vocabulary acquisition. They also extend previous research in two ways. First, a unique association between verbal working memory and expressive vocabulary in 2-year-olds was observed. Second, processing speed was not a unique predictor of variance in expressive vocabulary when included alongside measures of working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The objectives of the current study were to examine the effect of noise (-5 dB SNR) on auditory comprehension and to examine its relationship with working memory. It was hypothesized that noise has a negative impact on information processing, auditory working memory, and comprehension. Method: Children with normal hearing between the ages of 8 and 10 years were administered working memory and comprehension tasks in quiet and noise. The comprehension measure comprised 5 domains: main idea, details, reasoning, vocabulary, and understanding messages. Results: Performance on auditory working memory and comprehension tasks were significantly poorer in noise than in quiet. The reasoning, details, understanding, and vocabulary subtests were particularly affected in noise (p < .05). The relationship between auditory working memory and comprehension was stronger in noise than in quiet, suggesting an increased contribution of working memory. Conclusions: These data suggest that school-age children's auditory working memory and comprehension are negatively affected by noise. Performance on comprehension tasks in noise is strongly related to demands placed on working memory, supporting the theory that degrading listening conditions draws resources away from the primary task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between 2 components of memory--phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and working memory (WM)--and the control of relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Children with SLI and 2 control groups--an age-matched and a younger group of children with typical development--repeated sentences, including relative clauses, representing 5 syntactic roles and 2 levels of matrix clause complexity. The Working Memory Test Battery for Children was administered. Results: All 3 groups showed significant associations between pSTM and both types of matrix clause construction. For children with SLI, significant associations emerged between (a) WM and more complex matrix clause constructions, (b) WM and relative clauses including a range of syntactic roles, and (c) pSTM and the least difficult syntactic role. In contrast, the age-matched control group could repeat almost all syntactic roles without invoking the use of either memory component. Conclusions: The role of pSTM and WM in the production of relative clauses by children with SLI is influenced by the degree of difficulty of the structure to be recalled. In therapy, the effect of WM limitations can be minimized by approaching each structure within the context of a simple matrix clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The current study tested whether the difficulties of children with specific language impairment (SLI) in skill acquisition are related to learning processes that occur while practicing a new skill or to the passage of time between practice and later performance. Method: The acquisition and retention of a new complex grapho-motor symbol were studied in 5-year-old children with SLI and peers matched for age and nonverbal IQ. The children practiced the production of the symbol for 4 consecutive days. Retention testing took place 10 days later. Results: Children with SLI began each practice day slower than their peers but attained similar levels of performance by its end. Although they increased their performance speed within sessions more than their peers, they did not retain their learning as well between sessions. The loss in speed was largest in the 10-day retention interval. They were also less accurate, but accuracy differences decreased over time. Between-session group differences in speed could not fully be accounted for based on fine motor skills. Conclusions: In spite of effective within-session learning, children with SLI did not retain the new skill well. The deficit may be attributed to task forgetting in the presence of delayed consolidation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a)whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It was hypothesized that stressing the working memory system with the presence of noise would impede working memory processes in real time and result in poorer working memory performance in degraded conditions. Method: Twenty children with typical hearing between 8 and 10 years old were tested using 4 auditory working memory tasks (Forward Digit Recall, Backward Digit Recall, Listening Recall Primary, and Listening Recall Secondary). Stimuli were from the standardized Working Memory Test Battery for Children. Each task was administered in quiet and in 4-talker babble noise at 0 dB and –5 dB signal-to-noise ratios. Results: Children’s auditory working memory performance was systematically decreased in the presence of multitalker babble noise compared with quiet. Differences between low-complexity and high-complexity tasks were observed, with children performing more poorly on tasks with greater storage and processing demands. There was no interaction between noise and complexity of task. All tasks were negatively impacted similarly by the addition of noise. Conclusions: Auditory working memory performance was negatively impacted by the presence of multitalker babble noise. Regardless of complexity of task, noise had a similar effect on performance. These findings suggest that the addition of noise inhibits auditory working memory processes in real time for school-age children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this article, the authors examine the developmental continuity from prelinguistic communication to kindergarten age in language and working memory capacity. Method: Following work outlining 6 groups of children with different trajectories of early communication development (ECD; Määttä, Laakso, Tolvanen, Ahonen, & Aro, 2012), the authors examined their later development by psychometric assessment. Ninety-one children first assessed at ages 12–21 months completed a battery of language and working memory tests at age 5;3 (years;months). Results: Two of the ECD groups previously identified as being at risk for language difficulties continued to show weaker performance at follow-up. Seventy-nine percent of the children with compromised language skills at follow-up were identified on the basis of the ECD groups, but the number of false positives was high. The 2 at-risk groups also differed significantly from the typically developing groups in the measures tapping working memory capacity. Conclusions: In line with the dimensional view of language impairment, the accumulation of early delays predicted the amount of later difficulties; however, at the individual level, the prediction had rather low specificity. The results imply a strong link between language and working memory and call for further studies examining the early developmental interaction between language and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors explored the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing by systematically examining the performance of children with deficits in the domains of working memory and language. Method: From a database of 370 school-age children who had completed a grammaticality judgment task, groups were identified with a co-occurring language and working memory impairment (LI–WMI; n = 18) or specific language impairment (SLI) with typical working memory skills (n = 60) and matched control groups. Correct and incorrect use of grammatical markers occurred either early or late in sentence stimuli, imposing a greater working memory load for late-marker sentences. Results: Children with SLI showed a lower preference for grammatical items than typically developing controls, regardless of error marker position. Children with LI–WMI demonstrated a performance pattern modulated by error marker position: Their preference for grammatical items was lower than typically developing controls for late but not early marker sentences. Conclusion: This pattern of results suggests that there are distinct and dissociable impacts of working memory and linguistic skills on metalinguistic functioning through a grammatical judgment task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors of this study examined whether the type and number of word-learning cues affect how children infer and retain word-meaning mappings and whether the use of these cues changes with age. Method: Forty-eight 18- to 36-month-old children with typical language participated in a fast-mapping task in which 6 novel words were presented with 3 types of cues to the words' referents, either singly or in pairs. One day later, children were tested for retention of the novel words. Results: By 24 months of age, children correctly inferred the referents of the novel words at a significant level. Children retained the meanings of words at a significant rate by 30 months of age. Children retained the first 3 of the 6 word-meaning mappings by 24 months of age. For both fast mapping and retention, the efficacy of different cue types changed with development, but children were equally successful whether the novel words were presented with 1 or 2 cues. Conclusion: The type of information available to children at fast mapping affects their ability to both form and retain word-meaning associations. Providing children with more information in the form of paired cues had no effect on either fast mapping or retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the structure of children&apos;s mental lexicons through performance on 2 short experimental tasks, 1 in which children repeated familiar monosyllabic real words varying in neighborhood density and 1 in which they repeated CVC nonwords varying in phonotactic probability. Two groups of typically developing children with mean ages of 4;3 (years; months; n = 16) and 7;2 (n = 15) participated. In the group of younger children, offset-to-onset response latencies were not systematically affected by lexicality, phonotactic probability, or neighborhood density. Onset-to-onset latencies showed an effect of phonotactic probability on nonword repetition. Children in the older group repeated high-density real words with longer latencies than low-density real words. They also repeated high-probability nonwords with shorter latencies than low-probability nonwords. This was true for both the onset-to-onset andoffset-to-onset repetition latencies. Children in both age groups repeated vowels embedded in high-probability nonwords with shorter durations than vowels embedded in low-probability nonwords. These findings suggest that lexical competition and phonological facilitation emerge in development and that the rate of development is different for different dependent measures. KEY WORDS: phonological neighborhood density, phonotactic probability, nonword repetition, real-word repetition, children, Recent psycholinguistic investigations have converged on two conclusions regarding lexical and phonological representations in memory. The first is that the lexicon is organized systematically, based on the similarity of individual [...]

Purpose: The capacity to update and monitor the contents of working memory is an executive function presumed to play a critical role in language processing. The current study used an individual differences approach to consider the relationship between memory updating and accurate reference to story characters in the narratives of typically developing children. Method: English-speaking children from kindergarten to grade 2 (N = 63; Mage = 7.0 years) completed updating tasks, short-term memory tasks, and narrative productions. The authors used multiple regression to test whether updating accounted for independent variability in referential adequacy. Results: The capacity to update working memory was related to adequate character reference beyond the effects of age and of short-term memory capacity, with the strongest relationship emerging for maintaining reference over multiple utterances. Conclusions: This individual differences study is the first to show a link between updating and performance in a discourse production task for young school-age children. The findings contribute to the growing body of research investigating the role of working memory in shaping language production. This study invites extension to children of different ages and language abilities as well as to other language production tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Research shows that monolingual children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) have a higher incidence of cognitive-linguistic deficits, but it is not clear whether bilingual preschool children with CLP are especially vulnerable because they need to acquire 2 languages. We tested the hypothesis that bilingual children with CLP score lower than bilingual children with typical development (TD) on receptive vocabulary, verbal memory, and visuospatial memory. Method: Participants were 86 bilingual CLP children and 100 TD children 3-6 years of age, dominant in English or Mandarin. Each child completed assessments of English and Mandarin vocabulary, verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory, hearing, and articulation. Results: With analysis of covariance controlling for age and dominant language, no group differences were found between the CLP and TD bilingual children, although a correlational analysis indicated discrepancies in the relationship between variables. Conclusions: The findings do not support the hypothesis that preschool children with CLP score lower than preschool children with TD on receptive vocabulary and memory measures. Longitudinal research examining literacy skill development is needed to establish whether the deficits reported for school-age monolingual children with CLP become more obvious in bilingual children in later years, especially when the medium of instruction is the child's nondominant language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Considerable research has investigated the role of verbal working memory in language development in children with and without language problems. Much less is currently known about the relationship between language and the declarative and procedural memory systems. This study examined whether these 2 memory systems were related to typically developing children's past tense and lexical knowledge. Method: Fifty-eight typically developing children approximately 5 years of age completed a battery of linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks, including tests of vocabulary, past tense production, and procedural and declarative memory. Results: The results showed that declarative and procedural memory were not correlated with either regular or irregular past tense use. A significant correlation was observed between declarative memory and vocabulary. Conclusions: The results of the study were not consistent with the view that the declarative and procedural memory systems support children's use of the regular and irregular past tense. However, evidence was found suggesting that declarative memory supports vocabulary in this age group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method: Sixty-five children (6- to 12-year-olds) completed a verbal working memory (listening) span task that varied in syntactic processing difficulty (simple sentences representing a "simple working memory task," complex sentences representing a "complex working memory task") and a standardized sentence comprehension test. Results: Word recall on the simple and complex working memory tasks correlated with each other. Both memory tasks also correlated with children's sentence comprehension. Regression analyses showed that the simple working memory task remained a significant predictor of comprehension even after accounting for variance associated with age and performance on the complex working memory task. Conclusions: Results were interpreted to suggest that relative to more complex verbal working memory tasks, simple tasks are more robust predictors of children's sentence comprehension because they represent a basic yet robust index of working memory that sufficiently captures controlled attentional focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated sentence comprehension and spatial working memory abilities in a sample of internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized (PI) children. The authors compared the performance of these PI children with that of an age-matched group of children living with their birth families. They hypothesized that PI children would perform below clinical threshold on tasks of sentence comprehension and that poor sentence comprehension would be associated with poor performance in working memory. Method: Twenty-three PI children and 36 comparison children were administered sentence comprehension and spatial memory tasks from standardized assessments. Results: Some oral sentence comprehension skills and the spatial working memory skills were weaker in the school-age PI children than in the age-matched comparison children. A mediational analysis demonstrated that poor spatial working memory performance partially explains the sentence comprehension differences between the 2 groups. Conclusion: These findings provide valuable information to better plan early intervention and special education for PI children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To determine whether children with mild-to-moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss (CHL) present with disturbances in working memory and whether these disturbances relate to the size of their receptive vocabularies. Method: Children 6 to 9 years of age participated. Aspects of working memory were tapped by articulation rate, forward and backward digit span in the auditory and visual modalities, Corsi span, parent surveys, and a sequential encoding task. Articulation rate, digit spans, and Corsi spans were also administered in low-level broadband noise. Results: CHL and children with normal hearing (CNH) demonstrated auditory advantage in forward serial recall. CHL demonstrated slower articulation rates than CNH, but similar memory spans. CHL with poor executive function presented with poorer performance on the Corsi span task. The presence of background noise had no effect on performance in either group. CHL presented with significantly smaller receptive vocabularies than their CNH peers. Across groups, receptive vocabulary size was positively correlated with digit span in quiet, Corsi span in noise, and articulation rate. Conclusions: In the presence of mild-to-moderately severe hearing loss, children demonstrated resilient working memory systems. For all children, working memory and vocabulary were related; that is, children with poorer working memory had smaller vocabulary sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study evaluated the impact of socioeconomic factors on children's performance on tests of working memory and vocabulary. Method: Twenty Brazilian children, aged 6 and 7 years, from low-income families, completed tests of working memory (verbal short-term memory and verbal complex span) and vocabulary (expressive and receptive). A further group of Brazilian children from families of higher socioeconomic status matched for age, gender, and nonverbal ability also participated in the study. Results: Children from the low socioeconomic group obtained significantly lower scores on measures of expressive and receptive vocabulary than their higher income peers but no significant group differences were found on the working memory measures. Conclusion: Measures of working memory provide assessments of cognitive abilities that appear to be impervious to substantial differences in socioeconomic background. As these measures are highly sensitive to language ability and learning in general, they appear to provide useful methods for diagnosing specific learning difficulties that are independent of environmental opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself. Method: Fourteen-year-old children with LI and their typically developing peers participated in a wide range of processing speed and working memory tasks and were administered a comprehensive language test battery. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to compare 3 nested models designed to examine the dimensionality of the speed and working memory measures. A model that included a general speed factor was also evaluated. Results: The models meeting our evaluation criteria treated speed and working memory as separable factors. Furthermore, nonverbal as well as verbal processing factors emerged from these analyses. Latent variable regression analyses showed that each of the appropriate models accounted for 62% of the variance in the children's concurrent composite language test scores, with verbal working memory making the largest contribution. Conclusions: These findings shed light on the relationship among different types of processing and suggest that processing factors can contribute to the understanding of language disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to assess auditory sequential, short-term-memory (SSTM) performance in young children using cochlear implants (CI group) and to examine the relationship of this performance to receptive language performance. Twenty-four children, 5 to 11 years old, using the Nucleus 22-electrode cochlear implant, were tested on a number of auditory and visual tasks of SSTM. The auditory memory tasks were designed to minimize the effect of auditory discrimination ability. Stimuli were chosen that children with cochlear implants could accurately identify with a reaction time similar to that of a control group of children with normal hearing (NH group). All children were also assessed on a receptive language test and on a nonverbal intelligence scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines rate memory for connected speech in low-income children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Serial memory deficits in children with SLI; Relationship between short-term memory, phonological awareness, and beginning reading; Knowledge of nursery rhymes in preschoolers with SLI; Correlations among initial sound detection tasks and poem learning.