Young children's use of working memory for producing unfamiliar sentence structures

In a previous study (here termed Study 1), we explored the effects of working memory loads on young children's recall of passive voice structures. We found that participants (n = 36) were more likely to use the passive voice in recall responses when holding an unrelated memory load but were more likely to use the active voice when not under load. In the two new studies presented here (Studies 2 and 3), I extend these findings to explore how working memory loads impact not only children's recall but also their construction of original passive voice structures. In the first new study, I used a similar method to Adams and Cowan (2021) but gave 4- and 5-year-old participants (n = 38) more instruction and practice recalling the passive. Responses were categorized as either passive or active voice sentences (a small subset of responses could not be categorized as either syntax). Participants were more likely than in the previous work to use the passive voice overall, but use was not significantly impacted by memory loads. Participants were more likely to use the active voice when there was no load, as in the previous study. In a second study, I explored if 4- and 5-year-old children (n = 36) could form their own passive voice constructions about animations depicting transitive actions. Participants used the passive voice in around 21 percent of all responses, and used the active voice for most of the remaining responses. Working memory loads did not cause participants to speak in the passive or active voice more often. Performance on the QUILS, which combined measures of vocabulary, syntax, and processing abilities, predicted participant's ability to use the passive voice, especially when under working memory load. Combined results demonstrate the difference in task demand between recalling passive sentences versus constructing passive sentences and how working memory contributes to each.Includes bibliographical references

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 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

Isolated Naming Speed and development of Serial Recall

This project was a re-analysis of data collected as part of Elliott, E. M., Morey, C. C., AuBuchon, A. M., Cowan, N., Jarrold, C., Adams, E. J., ... & Voracek, M. (2021). Multilab Direct Replication of Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky (1966): Spontaneous Verbal Rehearsal in a Memory Task as a Function of Age. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(2), 25152459211018187

Multilab Direct Replication of Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky (1966): Spontaneous Verbal Rehearsal in a Memory Task as a Function of Age

Work by Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky indicated a change in the spontaneous production of overt verbalization behaviors when comparing young children (age 5) with older children (age 10). Despite the critical role that this evidence of a change in verbalization behaviors plays in modern theories of cognitive development and working memory, there has been only one other published near replication of this work. In this Registered Replication Report, we relied on researchers from 17 labs who contributed their results to a larger and more comprehensive sample of children. We assessed memory performance and the presence or absence of verbalization behaviors of young children at different ages and determined that the original pattern of findings was largely upheld: Older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task. In addition, continuous increase in overt verbalization from 7 to 10 years old was not consistently evident in our samples. These robust findings should be weighed when considering theories of cognitive development, particularly theories concerning when verbal rehearsal emerges and relations between speech and 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 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