Showing papers by "Susan E. Gathercole published in 2005"
TL;DR: This article investigated whether working memory skills of children are related to teacher ratings of their progress towards learning goals at the time of school entry, at 4 or 5 years of age, and found that the capacity to store and process material over short periods of time, referred to as working memory, and also the awareness of phonological structure, may play a crucial role in key learning areas for children at the beginning of formal education.
Abstract: This study investigates whether working memory skills of children are related to teacher ratings of their progress towards learning goals at the time of school entry, at 4 or 5 years of age. A sample of 194 children was tested on measures of working memory, phonological awareness, and non-verbal ability, in addition to the school-based baseline assessments in the areas of reading, writing, mathematics, speaking and listening, and personal and social development. Various aspects of cognitive functioning formed unique associations with baseline assessments; for example complex memory span with rated writing skills, phonological short-term memory with both reading and speaking and listening skills, and sentence repetition scores with both mathematics and personal and social skills. Rated reading skills were also uniquely associated with phonological awareness scores. The findings indicate that the capacity to store and process material over short periods of time, referred to as working memory, and also the awareness of phonological structure, may play a crucial role in key learning areas for children at the beginning of formal education.
301 citations
TL;DR: Persistently poor phonological memory skills do not appear to significantly constrain the acquisition of language, mathematics or number skills over the early school years, however, more general working memory skills appear to be crucial.
Abstract: Background: A longitudinal study investigated the cognitive skills and scholastic attainments at 8 years of age of children selected on the basis of poor phonological loop skills at 5 years. Methods: Children with low and average performance at 5 years were tested three years later on measures of working memory, phonological awareness, vocabulary, language, reading, and number skill. Results: Two subgroups of children with poor early performance on phonological memory tests were identified. In one subgroup, the poor phonological memory skills persisted at 8 years. These children performed at comparable levels to the control group on measures of vocabulary, language and mathematics. They scored more poorly on literacy assessments, but this deficit was associated with group differences in complex memory span and phonological awareness performance. The second subgroup of children performed more highly on phonological memory tests at 8 years, but had enduring deficits in language assessments from 4 to 8 years. Conclusions: Persistently poor phonological memory skills do not appear to significantly constrain the acquisition of language, mathematics or number skills over the early school years. More general working memory skills do, however, appear to be crucial. Keywords: Working memory; short-term memory; phonological awareness; vocabulary; language; mathematics, literacy.
218 citations
TL;DR: In learners with considerable familiarity with a second language, foreign vocabulary acquisition is mediated largely by use of existing knowledge representations, and phonological memory performance was closely linked to English vocabulary scores.
Abstract: The contributions of phonological short-term memory and existing foreign vocabulary knowledge to the learning of new words in a second language were compared in a sample of 40 Greek children studying English at school. The children's speed of learning new English words in a paired-associate learning task was strongly influenced by their current English vocabulary, but was independent of phonological memory skill, indexed by nonword repetition ability. However, phonological memory performance was closely linked to English vocabulary scores. The findings suggest that in learners with considerable familiarity with a second language, foreign vocabulary acquisition is mediated largely by use of existing knowledge representations.
178 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between sentence recall and reading and language skills in a group of 7-11-year-old children with learning difficulties and found that sentence recall was uniquely associated with reading skills.
88 citations
TL;DR: The findings are not consistent with the view that long-term knowledge influences on immediate recall accuracy can be exclusively attributed to a redintegration process of the type specified in multinomial processing tree model of immediate recall, and suggest that the beneficial effects of long- term knowledge on short-term recall accuracy are mediated by more than one mechanism.
80 citations
TL;DR: The authors found that children with relatively good and relatively poor phonological short-term memory skills, matched on general nonverbal ability, were more likely to substitute target words with synonyms rather than unrelated words, suggesting that mechanisms responsible for maintaining semantic information may also play an important role in performance of sentence recall.
Abstract: The primary objective of this study was to investigate links between phonological memory and short-term sentence recall. Errors in immediate sentence recall were compared for children with relatively good and relatively poor phonological short-term memory skills, matched on general nonverbal ability. The results indicate marked differences in the overall accuracy of recall between the two groups, with the high phonological memory group making fewer errors in sentence recall. Although the frequency of the different types of errors (lexical substitutions and nonsubstitutions) differed significantly between the groups, the serial position profiles of sentence recall accuracy was similar. Both groups were also more likely to substitute target words with synonyms rather than unrelated words, a finding suggesting that mechanisms responsible for maintaining semantic information may also play an important role in performance of sentence recall tasks.
64 citations
TL;DR: Three experiments investigated the roles of resource-sharing and intrinsic memory demands in complex working memory span performance in 7- and 9-year-olds and found the highest memory spans were found in the articulatory suppression task.
59 citations
TL;DR: Variation in the phonological similarity effect sizes across Experiments 1 to 3 supports the suggestion that task demands and characteristics have the potential to disrupt the phonology similarity effect and, by implication, the reliance on a phonological code.
Abstract: Phonological similarity effects were used to assess the role of acoustic coding in verbal complex span, a processing-plus-storage measure found to correlate significantly with aspects of complex cognition. Three experiments demonstrated consistent effects of phonological similarity on listening span. These effects appeared relatively insensitive to manipulations of task materials (Experiment 1) and differences in processing task demands (Experiments 2 and 3). The results were interpreted as reflecting a significant role for the phonological loop in supporting verbal complex span and a multicomponent view of working memory, as tapped by these tests. Phonological similarity did not significantly interact with aspects of the tasks varied across Experiments 1 to 3, suggesting a relative robustness of the effect. However, variation in the phonological similarity effect sizes across Experiments 1 to 3 supports the suggestion that task demands and characteristics have the potential to disrupt the phonological similarity effect and, by implication, the reliance on a phonological code.
42 citations
TL;DR: In both experiments, memory span was significantly greater when the items to be recalled belonged to a different stimulus category from the material that was processed, so that in sentence span tasks, number recall was superior to word recall, and in operation spans tasks, word recallwas superior to number recall.
Abstract: Two experiments investigated the impact of the relationship between processing and storage stimuli on the working memory span task performance of children aged 7 and 9 years of age. In Experiment 1, two types of span task were administered (sentence span and operation span), and participants were required to recall either the products of the processing task (sentence-final word, arithmetic total) or a word or digit unrelated to the processing task. Experiment 2 contrasted sentence span and operation span combined with storage of either words or digits, in tasks in which the item to be remembered was not a direct product of the processing task in either condition. In both experiments, memory span was significantly greater when the items to be recalled belonged to a different stimulus category from the material that was processed, so that in sentence span tasks, number recall was superior to word recall, and in operation span tasks, word recall was superior to number recall. Explanations of these findings in terms of similarity-based interference and response competition in working memory are discussed.
32 citations