Lexical access speed and the development of phonological recoding during immediate serial recall

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory

Working memory availability and quality control in children's production of passive sentences as novices

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Working memory (WM) is widely accepted as a necessary cognitive resource for a vast amount of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as WM capacities increase, so too does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks including language comprehension and production. The reasoning for the changes in language skills seen across typical development may differ according to linguistically-and cognitively-focused theories of language growth. We seek to add evidence to the cognitive view of language growth, by focusing on differences in WM availability. Much of the previous research linking WM and language development have been correlational. We examine how constraining WM resources can affect the concurrent language production of children aged 4 and 5. Participants (n = 24) were asked to recall the previously-heard, passive-voice descriptions of images displaying a transitive-verb action. These responses were performed while either holding a spatial-visual WM load, a verbal load, or no load at all. Participant responses were coded for either maintaining the syntax previously heard or changing the syntax to a more familiar syntactic form, the active voice. Our results showed that participants were more likely to transform the previously heard descriptions to the active voice when they had no additional memory load to hold. Though they used the target syntax more often under load, they produced more semantic errors while under a visual load, in particular. We suggest that the ability to both understand and rephrase sentences while maintaining meaning are constrained by available working memory resources

Children's long-term retention is directly constrained by their working memory capacity limitations

We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6–13-years old) and 40 young adults (18–24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes. Subsequently, we tested participants' LTM for items from the WM task. Using these measures, we estimated the ratio at which items successfully held in WM were recognized in LTM. While WM and LTM generally improved with age, the ability to transfer information from WM to LTM appeared consistent between age groups. Moreover, individual differences in WM capacity appeared to predict LTM encoding. Overall, these results suggested that LTM performance was constrained by experimental, individual, and age-related WM limitations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this WM-to-LTM bottleneck

Lexical Access Speed and the Development of Phonological Recoding during Immediate Serial Recall

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory

Lexical Access Speed and the Development of Phonological Recoding during Immediate Serial Recall

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall (Elliott et al., 2021) revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought (Flavell et al., 1966), but did not identify sources of individual differences.Here we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually-presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7- year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory