The role of verbal working memory in children's sentence comprehension: A critical review

Topics in Language Disorders

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 208-223

  Kidd, Evan ^a  

^a The Australian National University   (Australia)

Author keywords

Language acquisition; Sentence comprehension; Verbal working memory

Indexed keywords

EID: 84882450318     PISSN: 02718294     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0b013e31829d623e     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. Acheson, D. J., Hamidi, M., Binder, J. R., & Postle, B. R. (2011). A common neural substrate for language production and verbal working memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 1358-1367.
2. Acheson, D., & MacDonald, M. (2009). Verbal working memory and language production: Common approaches to serial ordering of verbal information. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 50-68.
3. Acheson, D. J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2011). The rhymes that the reader perused confused the meaning: Phonological effects during on-line sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 193- 207.
4. Alloway, T. P. (2007). Automated working memory assessment. London: Pearson.
5. Alloway, T. P., & Gathercole, S. (2005). The role of sentence recall in reading and language skills of children with learning difficulties. Learning and Individual Differences, 15, 271-282.
6. Alloway, T. P., Gathercole, S. E.,Willis, C., & Adams, A.-M. (2004). A structural analysis of working memory and related cognitive skills in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 87(2), 85-106.
7. Archibald, L. M. D., & Gathercole, S. E. (2006). Shortterm andworking memory in specific language impairment. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 41, 675-693.
8. Archibald, L. M. D., & Gathercole, S. E. (2007). The complexities of complex memory span: Storage and processing deficits in specific language impairment. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 177-194.
9. Arosio, F., Guasti, M. T., & Stucchi, N. (2011). Disambiguating information and memory resources in children's processing of Italian relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40, 137-154.
10. Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 417-423.
11. Baddeley, A. (2007). Working memory, thought, and action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
12. Baddeley, A. D., Gathercole, S. E., & Papagno, C. (1998). The phonological loop as a language learning device. Psychological Review, 105, 158-173.
13. Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14. Bishop, D. (2003). Test for the reception of grammar (2nd ed.). Oxford: Harcourt Assessment.
15. Booth, J. R., MacWhinney, B., & Haraskai, Y. (2000). Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences. Child Development, 71, 981-1003.
16. Boyle, W., Lindell, A. K., & Kidd, E. (2013). Investigating the role of verbal working memory in young children's sentence comprehension. Language Learning, 63, 211-242.
17. Bencini, G. M. L., & Valian, V. (2008). Abstract sentence representation in 3-year-olds: Evidence from comprehension and production. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 97-113.
18. Caplan, D., & Waters, G. S. (1999). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 77-126.
19. Christiansen, M. H., & MacDonald, M. C. (2009). A usagebased approach to recursion in sentence processing. Language Learning, 59(Suppl. 1), 126-161.
20. Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
21. Conti-Ramsden, G. M., Botting, N. F., & Faragher, B. (2001). Psycholinguisticmarkers for specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Allied Disciplines, 42, 741-748.
22. Conway, A. R., Cowan, N., Bunting,M. F., Therriault, D. J., & Minkoff, S. R. B. (2002). A latent variable analysis of working memory capacity, short-term memory capacity, processing speed, and general fluid intelligence. Intelligence, 30, 163-183.
23. Conway, C. M., Bauernschmidt, A., Huang, S. S., & Pisoni, D. B. (2010). Implicit statistical learning in language processing:Word predictability is the key. Cognition, 114, 356-371.
24. Corr̂ea, L. (1995). An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 183-203.
25. Cowan, N. (1996). Short-term memory,working memory, and their importance in language processing. Topics in Language Disorders, 17, 1-18.
26. Cowan, N. (2005).Workingmemory capacity. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
27. Cowan, N., Rouder, J. N., Blume, C. L., & Scott Saults, J. (2012). Models of verbal working memory capacity: What does it take to make them work? Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/a0027791
28. Daneman, M., & Blennerhassett, A. (1984). How to assess the listening comprehension skills of prereaders. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 1372-1381.
29. Daneman, M., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450-466.
30. Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81, 1-25.
31. Ellis Weismer, S., Evans, J.,&Hesketh, L. (1999). An examination of verbalworking memory capacity in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech. Language and Hearing Research, 42, 1249-1260.
32. Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
33. Engel de Abreu, P. M. J., & Gathercole, S. E. (2012). Executive and phonological processes in second language acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 974-986.
34. Engel de Abreu, P. M. J., Gathercole, S. E., & Martin, R. (2011). Disentangling the relationship between working memory and language: The roles of short-term storage and cognitive control. Learning and Individual Differences, 21, 569-574.
35. Ericsson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102, 211-245.
36. Felser, C., Marinis, T., & Clahsen, H. (2003). Children's processing of ambiguous sentences: A study of relative clause attachment. Language Acquisition, 11, 127- 163.
37. Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading (pp. 559-586). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
38. Friedman, N. P.,&Miyake, A. (2004). The relations among inhibition and interference cognitive functions: A latent variable analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 101-135.
39. Gathercole, S., Pickering, S., Ambridge, B., & Wearing, H. (2004). The structure of working memory from 4 to 15 years of age. Developmental Psychology, 40, 177-190.
40. Gathercole, S. E., Willis, C., Emslie, H., & Baddeley, A. (1992). Phonological memory and vocabulary development during the early school years: A longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 28, 887-898.
41. Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
42. Gennari, S. P., &MacDonald,M. C. (2008). Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 161-187.
43. Gaulin, C., & Campbell, T. (1994). Procedure for assessing verbal working memory in normal school-age children: Some preliminary data. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 79, 55-64.
44. Holmes, J., Gathercole, S. E., & Dunning, D. L. (2009). Adaptive training leads to sustained enhancement of poor working memory in children, Developmental Science, 12, F9-F15.
45. Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122-149.
46. Kidd, E. (Ed.) (2011). The acquisition of relative clauses: Processing, typology, and function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
47. Kidd, E. (2012). Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax. Developmental Psychology, 48, 171-184.
48. Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. L. (2002). English-speaking children's understanding of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 599-617.
49. Kidd, E., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 860-897.
50. Kidd, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Examining the role of lexical frequency in children's acquisition of sentential complements. Cognitive Development, 21, 93-107.
51. Leff, A. P., Schofield, T. M., Crinion, J. T., Seghier, M. L., Grogan, A., Green, D. W., et al. (2009). The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke. Brain, 132, 3401-3410.
52. Leonard, L. B., Ellis Weismer, S., Miller, C. A., Francis, D. J., Tomblin, J. B., & Kail, R. V. (2007). Speed of processing, working memory, and language impairment in children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 408-428.
53. Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2006). Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 447-454.
54. Logie, R. H. (2011). The functional organization and capacity limits of working memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 240-245.
55. Lum, J. A., Conti-Ramsden, G., Page, D., & Ullman, M. T. (2012). Working, declarative and procedural memory in specific language impairment. Cortex, 48, 1138- 1154.
56. Lust, B., Foley, C., & Dye, C. (2009). The first language acquisition of complex sentences. In E. Bavin (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of child language (pp. 237-257). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
57. MacDonald, M., & Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54.
58. Magimairaj, B. M., & Montgomery, J. W. (2012). Children's verbal working memory: Role of processing complexity in predicting spoken sentence comprehension. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55, 669-682.
59. Mainela-Arnold, E., & Evans, J. L. (2005). Beyond capacity limitations: Determinants of word recall performance on verbal working memory span tasks in childrenwith SLI. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 897-909.
60. Mainela-Arnold, E., Evans, J. L.,&Coady, J. (2010). Beyond capacity limitations II: Effects of lexical processes on word recall in verbal working memory tasks in children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53, 1656-1672.
61. Marshall, C., & Nation, K. (2003). Individual differences in semantic and structural errors in children's memory for sentences. Educational and Child Psychology, 20, 7-18.
62. Marton, K., & Schwartz, R. G. (2003). Working memory capacity and language processes in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 1138-1153.
63. Marton, K., Schwartz, R. G., Farkas, L., & Katsnelson, V. (2006). Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): a cross-linguistic comparison. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 41, 653-673.
64. Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts. Cognitive Linguistics, 20, 599-626.
65. Melby-Lervåg, M., Lervåg, A., Lyster, S.-A. H., Klem, M., Hagtvet, B., & Hulme, C. (2012). Nonword-repetition ability does not appear to be a causal influence on children's vocabulary development. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1092-1098.
66. Misyak, J. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Statistical learning and language: An individual differences study. Language Learning, 62, 302-331.
67. Montgomery, J. W., Magimairaj, B. M., & Finney, M. C. (2010). Working memory and specific language impairment: An update on the relation and perspectives on assessment and treatment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 19, 78-94.
68. Montgomery, J. W. (1996). Sentence comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment. Topics in Language Disorders, 17, 19- 32.
69. Montgomery, J. (2000a). Relation of working memory to off-line and real-time sentence processing in children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 117-148.
70. Montgomery, J. (2000b). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 239-308.
71. Montgomery, J. (2003). Working memory and comprehension in children with specific language impairment: what we know so far. Journal of Communication Disorders, 36, 221-231.
72. Montgomery, J. W., & Evans, J. L. (2009). Complex sentence processing and working memory in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52(2), 269-288.
73. Montgomery, J. W., Evans, J. L., & Gillam, R. (2009). Relation of auditory attention on complex sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: A preliminary study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 123-151.
74. Montgomery, J. (1995). Sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: The role of phonological working memory. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 187-199.
75. Montgomery, J. W.,Magimairaj, B.,&O'Malley, M. (2008). The role of working memory in typically developing children's complex sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 37, 331-354.
76. Nation, K., Adams, J. W., Bowyer-Crane, C. A., & Snowling, M. J. (1999). Working memory deficits in poor comprehenders reflect underlying language impairments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 73, 139-158.
77. Oberauer, K.,&Lewandowsky, S. (2010).Modelingworking memory: A computational implementation of the Time-Based Resource Sharing theory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 10-45.
78. O'Grady, W. (2005). Syntactic carpentry: An emergentist approach to syntax. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
79. Potter, M. C., & Lombardi, L. (1990). Regeneration in short-term recall of sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 633-654.
80. Roberts, L., Marinis, T., Felser, C., & Clahsen, H. (2007). Antecedent priming at trace positions in children's sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 175-188.
81. Roland, D., Dick, F., & Elman, J. (2007). Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 348-379.
82. Shah, P., & Miyake, A. (1999). Models of working memory. In A. Miyake, Shah P. (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp. 1-27). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
83. St. Clair-Thompson, H., Stevens, R., Hunt, A., & Bolder, E. (2010). Improving children's working memory and classroom performance. Educational Psychology, 30, 203-219.
84. Stokes, S. F., & Klee, T. (2009). Factors that influence vocabulary development in two-year-old children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 50, 498-505.
85. Stothard, S. E. and Hulme, C. (1992). Reading comprehension difficulties in children: The role of language comprehension and working memory skills. Reading and Writing, 4, 245-256.
86. Valian, V. (1991). Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition, 40, 21-81.
87. Vasilyeva, M., Huttenlocher, J., & Waterfall, H. (2006). Effect of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers. Developmental Psychology, 42, 164- 174.
88. Waters, G., & Caplan, D. (1996). The capacity theory of sentence comprehension: Critique of Just and Carpenter (1992). Psychological Review, 103, 761-772.
89. Weighall, A. R., & Altmann, G. T. M. (2011). The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses. Journal of Child Language, 38, 579-605.
90. Wells, J., Christiansen, M., Race, D., Acheson, D., & MacDonald, M. (2009). Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 250-271.
91. Willis, C., & Gathercole, S. (2001). Phonological shortterm memory contributions to sentence processing in young children. Memory, 9, 349-363.