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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...

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Investigating sentence processing and language segmentation in explaining children's performance on a sentence-span

Elina Mainela-Arnold1, Maya Misra, Carol Miller

  • 1Communication Sciences and Disorders, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. elina.mainela.arnold@utoronto.ca

International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders
|February 29, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Children's ability to segment language, not sentence processing speed, predicts verbal working memory performance. This suggests focusing on language skills, not just working memory capacity, for interventions.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Children with weaker language skills often struggle with verbal working memory tasks.
  • This has led to the hypothesis that limited working memory capacity hinders language development.
  • However, language abilities themselves might influence working memory task performance.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how sentence-processing efficiency and language segmentation ability affect children's performance on verbal working memory tasks.
  • To explore the relationship between metalinguistic skills and working memory capacity in children.

Main Methods:

  • 37 children (aged 6-13) with varied language abilities completed the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT) for sentence-span assessment.
  • Sentence-processing efficiency was measured by response times to sentence veracity judgments.
  • Phonological processing subtests (Elision, Blending Words) assessed language segmentation and combination skills.

Main Results:

  • Children's ability to segment words (Elision) significantly predicted word recall on the CLPT.
  • Sentence processing speed was not a significant unique predictor of CLPT performance.
  • Language segmentation skills appear to be a key factor in verbal working memory task outcomes.

Conclusions:

  • Individual differences in sentence-span tasks are partly explained by language segmentation abilities.
  • Metalinguistic skills may directly influence working memory task performance, challenging capacity-based explanations.
  • Interventions should consider building language skills, including metalinguistic knowledge, to improve processing capacities.