Contributions of children's linguistic and working memory proficiencies to their judgments of grammaticality

The authors explored the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing by systematically examining the performance of children with deficits in the domains of working memory and language.

From a database of 370 school-age children who had completed a grammaticality judgment task, groups were identified with a co-occurring language and working memory impairment (LI-WMI; n = 18) or specific language impairment (SLI) with typical working memory skills ( n = 60) and matched control groups. Correct and incorrect use of grammatical markers occurred either early or late in sentence stimuli, imposing a greater working memory load for late-marker sentences.

Children with SLI showed a lower preference for grammatical items than typically developing controls, regardless of error marker position. Children with LI-WMI demonstrated a performance pattern modulated by error marker position: Their preference for grammatical items was lower than typically developing controls for late but not early marker sentences.

This pattern of results suggests that there are distinct and dissociable impacts of working memory and linguistic skills on metalinguistic functioning through a grammatical judgment task.