PHONOLOGICAL WORKING-MEMORY AND SPOKEN LANGUAGE-DEVELOPMENT IN YOUNG-CHILDREN

This study investigated the relationship between phonological working memory and spoken language development in a large unselected sample of 4- and 5-year old children. Assessments were made of the language pro duced by the children on the Bus Story (Renfrew, 1969), a standard tes t of continuous speech. In this test, children listen to a story, whic h they then recount with the aid of visual clues. The amount of inform ation recalled and the average length of the five longest utterances a re taken as indices of children's expressive language abilities. Phono logical working memory skills were indexed by memory span and the abil ity to repeat non-words. The ability to repeat non-words made a signif icant contribution to the variance in the children's speech independen tly of age, vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal cognitive skills. The possible mechanisms by which skills assessed by phonological memory ta sks may be linked to the development of speech production abilities ar e considered.