Showing papers by "Susan E. Gathercole published in 1999"

Phonological short-term memory and vocabulary development: Further evidence on the nature of the relationship.

Abstract: The nature and generality of the developmental association between phonological short-term memory and vocabulary knowledge was explored in two studies. Study 1 investigated whether the link between vocabulary and verbal memory arises from the requirement to articulate memory items at recall or from earlier processes involved in the encoding and storage of the verbal material. Four-year-old children were tested on immediate memory measures which required either spoken recall (nonword repetition and digit span) or recognition of a sequence of nonwords. The phonological memory-vocabulary association was found to be as strong for the serial recognition as recall-based measures, favouring the view that it is phonological short-term memory capacity rather than speech output skills which constrain word learning. In Study 2, the association between phonological memory skills and vocabulary knowledge was found to be strong in teenaged as well as younger children, indicating that phonological memory constraints on word learning remain significant throughout childhood.

Phonotactic influences on short-term memory

Abstract: The impact of phonotactic probabilities on serial recall was investigated in a series of experiments. In Experiments 1A and 1B, 7 and 8 year olds were tested on their serial recall of monosyllabic words and of nonwords varying in phonotactic frequencies. A recall advantage to words over nonwords remained when stimuli were balanced for phonotactic probability, but nonword recall showed superior accuracy for high over low probability nonwords, as in Experiment 2. The nonword frequency effect appears to reflect the frequency of constituent syllables rather than biphones. Both lexicality and high phonotactic frequency led to increased proportions of full over partial recall of the memory stimuli. These findings indicate that decayed memory traces in phonological short-term memory can be reconstructed using either lexical or phonotactic knowledge.

Phonological Short-term Memory and Foreign Language Learning

Abstract: This study investigated links between short-term memory skills and children’s abilities to learn the vocabulary of a foreign language taught in school. Forty-® ve Greek children who were learning English as a foreign language were assessed on their short-term memory in both languages, and on their knowledge of both native and foreign vocabulary. Knowledge of native and foreign vocabulary shared highly signi® cant associations with the phonological short-term memory measures. However, vocabulary scores in the two languages shared a close relationship that could not be explained exclusively in terms of phonological loop capacity. Implications of these ® ndings for theoretical accounts of how words are learned in the native and foreign language are considered. Cette e tude explore les liens entre les habilete s de me moire aA court terme et la capacite des enfants aA apprendre le vocabulaire d’une langue e trangeA re. Quarante-cinq enfants grecs ont e te e value s au plan de leur me moire aA court terme et de leur connaissance du vocabulaire dans les deux langues (grec et anglais). La connaissance du vocabulaire dans les deux langues est fortement associe e aux mesures de me moire a court terme phonologique. Cependant, meA me si la relation entre les deux scores de connaissance du vocabulaire est treA s forte, celle-ci ne peut eA tre explique e exclusivement en terme de capacite de la boucle phonologique. La discussion porte sur les implications de ces re sultats pour des hypotheA ses the oriques expliquant l’apprentissage des mots dans une langue maternelle et dans une langue e trangeA re.

Language-specific Knowledge and Short-term Memory in Bilingual and Non-bilingual Children

Abstract: The sensitivity of children's phonological short-term memory performance to language-specific knowledge was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, monolingual English children, English-French bilingual children, and English children who were learning French as a second language were compared on measures of phonological short-term memory and vocabulary in the two languages. The children's short-term memory performance in each language mirrored their familiarity with English and French, with greater vocabulary knowledge being associated with higher levels of recall of both words and nonwords in that language. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which two groups of children with good knowledge of English and French were examined: native bilingual children who had comparable knowledge of the two languages and non-native bilingual children who had a greater knowledge of their native than second language. The findings indicate that phonological short-term memory is not a language-independent system but, rather, functions in a highly language-specific way.

Estimating the Capacity of Phonological Short-term Memory

Abstract: Two methods of assessing the capacity of phonological short-term memory that minimize support from long-term memory were compared in a sample of 7- and 8-year-old children. The children were tested on immediate serial recall of words and nonwords, and on the serial recognition of sequences composed of words and nonwords. Serial recognition scores were found to be highly related to children's accuracy of recall of nonwords composed of low-probability phonotactic combinations, but were independent of the long-term memory contributions to recall estimated in the serial recall experiment. Children with high vocabulary knowledge performed significantly better than low vocabulary children on both the recall and recognition measures. It is argued that the convergence of the two techniques lends substantial validity to their use as assessments of phonological storage capacity relatively free of long-term memory influence, and that the crucial difference between children varying in vocabulary knowledge lies in thi...