Children's perception of temporally distorted sentential approximations of varying length

The purpose of this study was to investigate the abilities of second-grade and fourth-grade children to auditorially process three orders of three- and five-word sentential approximations, which had normal interstimulus intervals (ISI) and ISIs of 200 and 400 ms. Results showed that percent correct scores decreased as a function of increasing sentence length and ISI, and decreasing order of sentential approximation and grade level. The results are discussed relative to theoretical notions of short-term memory and auditory perceptual processing as well as potential clinical applications.