Does the structure of working memory in EL children vary across age and two language systems?

ABSTRACT

This study examined the cross-sectional structure of working memory (WM) among elementary school English learners (ELs). A battery of WM tasks was administered in Spanish (L1) and English (L2) within five age groups (ages 6, 7, 8, 9, & 10). Confirmatory factor analysis showed a three-factor structure of WM emerged in both L1 and L2 administrations for each age group. The important findings, however, were: (1) the separation between the executive component and storage component (phonological loop) structure of WM increased as a function of age within both language systems, (2) the structure of WM supported a domain general phonological storage component and a domain general executive system across both language systems, and (3) the visual-spatial WM system shared minimal variance with the executive system. Taken together, the findings support Baddeley’s multicomponent model (e.g., Baddeley & Logie, 1999. The multiple-component model. In A. Miyake & P. Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp. 28–61). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) as a good fit to the structure of WM in EL children’s English and Spanish language system.

KEYWORDS:

• Working memory
• bilingual children
• multicomponent model

Acknowledgement

Special appreciation is given to, Jill Leafstedt, Kelly Roston, Danielle Guzman-Orth, Joseph Rios, Elizabeth Arellano, Nicole Garcia, Alfredo Aviles, Steve Gómez, Paula Aisemberg, Valerie Perry, Loren Albeg, Dennis Sisco-Taylor, Wenson Fung, and School District Liaison and Consultant: Erin Bostick Mason, Leilani Sáez and Cathy Lussier for data collection and/or analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The data for the major part of this study is based on a four-year longitudinal study funded by the California Linguistic Minority Research Institute Grant (Grant 02002CY-01CG-R) and the U.S. Department of Education, Cognition and Student Learning (USDE R324A090092) and completion of this work was supported by an NSF grant (DRL 1660828) awarded to the first author; Institute of Education Sciences.