Measuring the Effects of Cognitive Capacity on Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From Elementary School-Age Children

Our aim was to (a) develop a sentence comprehension measure that distinguished between cognitive capacity and syntactic knowledge in school-age children and (b) examine the relationship between comprehension performance and cognitive variables (working memory capacity and retrieval from long-term memory).

We developed and administered a picture selection sentence comprehension task to 122 school-age children representing varied cognitive abilities. We evaluated comprehension accuracy and response time in two syntactically identical conditions but with different cognitive demands incorporated in picture foils-one with low demand using superfluous adjectives and another with high demand using contrastive adjectives. Children also completed tasks measuring working memory capacity and long-term memory retrieval.

Comprehension accuracy was significantly lower, and response times were longer in the high-cognitive demand condition compared to the low-demand condition. Errors frequently involved incorrect attribute selection in the high-demand condition that included contrastive adjectives in picture foils, while reversal errors prevailed in the low-demand condition, which included superfluous adjectives. Accuracy correlated positively with the memory variables. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that after adjusting for comprehension in the low-cognitive demand condition (38.60% variance), memory variables accounted for 4.50% additional variance in the high-demand condition with only working memory capacity as the unique predictor.

The significant role of working memory capacity in comprehending sentences with high cognitive demand indicated the recruitment of active attention and verbal rehearsal. Data support the newly developed measure's potential for assessing cognitive skills integral to sentence comprehension in school-age children.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26767063.