Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in children with specificlanguage impairment

In this study we examined the influence of verbal working memory on sentenc e comprehension in children with SLI. Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for age (CA), and 12 children matched for rece ptive vocabulary (VM) completed two tasks, in the verbal working memory tas k, children recalled as many real words as possible under three processing load conditions (i.e., no-load condition; single-load condition, where word s were recalled according to physical size of word referents; and dual-load condition, where words were recalled by semantic category and physical siz e of word referents). In the sentence comprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant (shorter) and linguistically redundant (lon ger) sentences. Results of the memory task showed that the children with SL I recalled fewer words in the dual-load condition than their CA peers, who showed no condition effect. The SLI and VM groups performed similarly overa ll, but both groups showed poorer recall in the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. On the sentence comprehension task, children with SU comprehended fewer sentences of both types than the CA children and fewer redundant sentences relative to themselves and to the VM children. Results were interpreted to suggest that children with SLI (a) have less functional verbal working memory capacity (i.e., ability to coordinate both storage a nd processing functions) than their CA peers and (b) have greater difficult y managing both their working memory abilities and general processing resou rces than both age peers and younger children when performing a "complex" o ff-line sentence processing task.