Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language...

English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology.

To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory performance. It was examined whether syntactic complexity has a larger impact on working memory performance than sentence length in Hungarian-speaking children, similar to the findings in English speaking children.

In Experiment 1, performance accuracy was measured with two linguistic span tasks that included stimuli with varying sentence length and syntactic complexity. Experiment 2 examined the impact of sentence length and morphological complexity on working memory performance.

Children with SLI performed more poorly than their age-matched peers in all working memory tasks. Their error patterns differed from those of children with typical language development. Children with SLI produced a high number of interference errors that indicate poor executive functions. The findings were compared with previous results of English-speaking children. Complexity affected working memory performance accuracy differently across languages. In English, it was the increase of syntactic complexity that resulted in a decrease in performance accuracy, whereas in Hungarian, it was the morphological complexity that had a large impact on working memory performance.

Working memory performance depends on the linguistic characteristics of the language tested. In both English- and Hungarian-speaking children, complexity has a larger effect on verbal working memory performance than the length of the stimuli. However, complexity affects working memory performance accuracy differently across languages.