NONWORD REPETITION - THE ROLE OF WORKING- MEMORY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTACTIC LANGUAGE ABILITIES

Six-year-old and eight-year-old-children received a nonword repetition task. Length of the nonwords (two-, three-, and four-syllabic) as wel l as the kind of acoustic presentation (undistorted, distorted, very d istorted) were experimentally varied within subjects. The detrimental effect of word-length was more pronounced with a distorted as compared to an undistorted item presentation. In addition, substantial positiv e correlations were found between measures of syntactical language abi lities and phonological working memory capacity. Moreover, age differe nces in children's imitation of syntactical structures were eliminated when working memory capacity was statistically partialled our. The re sults were discussed with regard to the role of phonological working m emory in the development of children's performance in syntactical lang uage tasks.