Authors:

Gathercole, S. & Baddeley, A.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1990

CBU number:

2454

Abstract:

The phonological memory skills of a group of children with disordered language development were compared with two control groups, one group matched on verbal ability and the other matched on non-verbal intelligence. The language-disordered children were poorer at reading single non-words and recalling word lists than even the younger children of matched non-verbal ability. The language-disordered children were however sensitive to both the phonological similarity and word length, of the memory lists, except for the longest lists. The results of two further experiments indicate that poor memory performance of the language-disordered children is unlikely to be due to either impaired perceptual processing or to slow articulation rate. Our proposal is that the deficit in the phonological storage component of working memory may underpin the poor memory performance of the language-disordered children, and could play a central role in their disordered language development.