Verbal short-term memory in children: The role of the articulator loop

Abstract

Three experiments investigated immediate memory for drawings of familiar objects in children of different ages. The aim was to investigate the effect of articulatory suppression on word length and phonemic similarity effects. Experiment 1 showed that, with pictorial presentation, 11-year-old children showed word length effects in memory span which were abolished by suppression, whereas 5-year-olds did not. Experiment 2 provided similar results in relation to the phonemic similarity effect. Experiment 3 showed that the absence of word length and phonemic similarity effects in the younger children was not due to a floor effect, because similar results were obtained in the serial recall of lists of fixed length. In all three experiments the processing demands of the suppression task were controlled for by comparing it with a simple motor task involving tapping. In the younger children, suppression and tapping had the same effect; in the older children, tapping reduced performance but did not abolish the phonemic similarity effect. The results were interpreted in tern of working memory as suggesting that young children do not encode pictorial material in a verbal form, whereas older children, like adults, do. The developmental consequences of the findings are discussed.

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