Deaf children's non-verbal working memory is impacted by their language experience.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Deaf children often show poorer working memory performance than hearing children.
• Previous studies couldn't distinguish if this deficit stems from deafness or reduced language exposure.
• Verbal tasks and spoken language use in deaf children complicate understanding the impact of language acquisition quality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of early language exposure on non-verbal working memory (NVWM) in deaf children.
• To compare NVWM in hearing children, native signers, and non-native signers.
• To determine if language skills predict NVWM performance in deaf and hearing children.

Main Methods:

• Compared three groups: hearing children (n=28), native British Sign Language (BSL) users (n=8), and non-native BSL users (n=19), aged 6-11.
• Administered non-verbal reasoning, NVWM, and language tasks.
• Used multiple regression to analyze the relationship between language scores and NVWM performance.

Main Results:

• Deaf non-native signers performed significantly worse on executive-loaded NVWM tasks than native signers and hearing children.
• Hearing and native signer groups showed comparable NVWM performance.
• Vocabulary scores predicted NVWM task performance, even after controlling for age and non-verbal reasoning.

Conclusions:

• Early and rich language experience, regardless of modality, is critical for developing non-verbal working memory.
• Native language acquisition from birth supports robust working memory development in deaf children.
• Language skills are a significant predictor of non-verbal working memory capabilities.