Psycholinguistic mechanisms supporting school-age children's comprehension of spoken directions: A preliminary study

Abstract

The contribution of two working memory mechanisms to school-age children's comprehension of spoken directions was examined. Sixty typically developing school-age children completed the CELF-4 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4, Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2003) concepts and following oral directions subtest and four predictor measures. Predictors included global measures of lexical and syntactic knowledge, verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity, and the updating mechanism in WM. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted. Regression analysis indicated that lexical knowledge, STM capacity, and updating accuracy jointly accounted for 27% variance in the comprehension of spoken directions as measured by the CELF-4, with receptive vocabulary contributing the most. STM capacity and updating accuracy were comparably robust in their contribution and shared mechanisms that accounted for significant variance in the criterion. The importance of understanding the relation between cognitive and language processes is highlighted. The limitations of the study and methodological considerations for research in children with developmental language impairment are discussed.

Keywords:

• Comprehension of spoken directions
• Short-term memory capacity
• Updating in working memory
• Working memory
• School-age children
• Following instructions

Acknowledgements

The author expresses gratitude to all children and their parents who participated in this study.

Disclaimer statement

Contributor This is a single-author manuscript.

Funding None.

Conflict of interest The author has no conflicts-of-interest related to this study.

Ethics approval The study was conducted in full compliance with Institutional Review Board procedures at Ohio University.

Notes

1 Switch cost variables such as the difference between switch vs. non switch RT and difference in accuracy between high and low frequency switch trials were examined but not included in the modeling because they were not related to the outcome after adjusting for age. Also, based on previous research (Magimairaj and Montgomery, 2012) attention focus switching-updating accuracy and switch RT were most robust in representing controlled attention in children's working memory as measured by this switching-updating task.