Verbal working memory and early literacy acquisition: do ELLs allocate resources similar to their typical monolingual peers or monolingual children with SLI?

ABSTRACT

The role of verbal working memory (VWM) in early language and literacy development among typical and atypical monolingual children exposed to different orthographies is well established. Less is known how English Language Learners (ELLs) allocate their VWM resources in early stages of literacy acquisition in English (L2). This study examined the role of phonological (PM) and working memory (WM) in L2 decoding, sight word recognition and spelling among ELLs attending kindergarten in an urban Title I school. The results of ELLs’ assessments across cognitive and linguistic reading pre-requisites were compared to the assessments on the same measures of typical and specific language impaired (SLI) monolingual peers. Despite decreased vocabulary and lower phonological awareness (PA) skills ELLs did not differ from typical monolingual peers on VWM skills and early literacy outcomes, but outperformed SLIs. However, ELLs relied exclusively on PM for decoding and spelling, which differed from typical monolingual peers. These results provide important information regarding L2 language and early literacy development among Spanish-speaking ELLs, and should help to conceptualize the educational strategies for supporting ELLs based on their L1 structure. Measure of PM may be discriminating criteria between ELLs and SLIs, as poor PM is an established marker for SLI.

KEYWORDS:

• English language learners
• phonological memory
• working memory
• reading pre-requisites
• early literacy

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elena Zaretsky is a faculty at Clark University Department of Psychology. She specializes in developmental psycholinguistics with research interests in language and literacy development across languages in typical and atylical population, bilingual language and literacy acquisition and cross-linguistic transfer. She is a co-editor of Benjamin Current Topics book “Cross-linguistic Transfer in Reading in Multilingual Contexts” (2016).

Notes

1 Title I schools serve children who are eligible to free lunch. The whole public school system, where the research took place, is considered Title I.

2 Most of the parents have only elementary school education in their L1 and are unable to read English.

3 We attribute this finding to our sample of SLIs: being from middle class families and having continuous speech and language services, they had relatively high scores on vocabulary and PA measures, therefore representing the milder end of the disordered pattern.