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Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)
Published on: June 12, 2017
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The relationship between working memory, production, and comprehension: evidence from children's errors in complex wh
C Jane Lutken1, Geraldine Legendre2
1Department of Psychology, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NCUSA.
Journal of Child Language
|January 13, 2025
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Child language acquisition
- Linguistic development
- Cognitive psychology
Background:
- English-speaking children exhibit
- Scope-Marking Errors
- in biclausal questions, impacting both production and comprehension.
- These errors have been linked to theories of Universal Grammar (UG) and multiple grammar acquisition.
- Recent research suggests immature processing mechanisms, rather than solely grammatical factors, may underlie these errors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between children's working memory (WM) capacity and their performance on biclausal question production and comprehension tasks.
- To explore whether production and comprehension errors in biclausal questions stem from distinct underlying causes.
Main Methods:
- Children's production and comprehension of biclausal questions were assessed.
- Working memory (WM) capacity was measured in participating children.
- Statistical analyses were performed to identify correlations between WM and error rates in both production and comprehension.
Main Results:
- A significant correlation was found between working memory capacity and the rate of scope-marking errors in children's language.
- Children who made production errors did not consistently make comprehension errors, and vice versa.
Conclusions:
- Working memory limitations appear to play a role in children's scope-marking errors.
- Production and comprehension errors in biclausal questions may arise from separate underlying mechanisms, potentially related to processing efficiency and working memory.
Keywords:
language acquisitionprocessing mechanismssentence comprehensionsentence productionworking memoryMore Related Videos
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