Phonological loop and central executive contributions to oral comprehension skills of 5.5 to 9.5 years old children

Abstract

Oral story comprehension in 5.5, 7.5 and 9.5 year old children is examined in relation to working memory (WM) contributions. The phonological loop (PL) of the Baddeley and Hitch WM model was assessed with word, non-word and digit recall and a word list matching task. The central executive (CE) was assessed with listening, counting and backward digit recall tasks. A composite score was calculated for each WM component. Receptive vocabulary and oral comprehension were also assessed. Regression analyses demonstrated CE contributions to oral comprehension overall, and also to comprehension sub-skills (above any vocabulary contributions). Effects were stronger in preschoolers and decreased with age. The PL did not play an important role in oral comprehension. Comprehension control was the comprehension skill best predicted. The study demonstrates the CE importance in off-line comprehension processes during early childhood and the usefulness of assessing CE processes for identifying possible comprehension difficulties later at school.

The relationship between reading and listening comprehension: shared and modality-specific components

“…Findings on the role of verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory have either shown that verbal working memory contributes to listening comprehension outcome (Florit, Roch, Altoè, & Levorato, 2009;Potocki, Ecalle, & Magnan, 2013;Tighe, Spencer, & Schatschneider, 2015), or show no clear-cut contribution (Alonzo, Yeomans-Maldonado, Murphy, & Bevens, 2016;Kim, 2016). Effects of verbal memory seem to decline when children get older (Chrysochoou & Bablekou, 2011;Tighe et al, 2015). Furthermore, Currie and Cain (2015) found that effects of verbal short-term and verbal working memory on listening comprehension were fully mediated by vocabulary.…”

The unique role of verbal memory, vocabulary, concentration and self-efficacy in children’s listening comprehension in upper elementary grades

“…Nevertheless, Florit et al (2009) did find a contribution of VSTM, but Wolf et al (2019) did not. We cannot rule out that the type of VSTM task used impacted on the findings, as different measures were used, with some using digit span forwards (Florit et al, 2009; Wolf et al, 2019; present study) and others non-word repetition (Potocki et al, 2013) or several measures of VSTM (Chrysochoou & Bablekou, 2011; Currie & Cain, 2015). Again, however, despite the use of similar measures, and fixing the residual variances of our single indicators on the basis of previously reported reliabilities, the attested relationships between VSTM, vocabulary and listening comprehension are not the same.…”

“…The findings on the effect of VSTM on listening comprehension are not consistent. Some studies do not indicate a strong influence of VSTM: no effects of VSTM were found on passage comprehension by Wolf et al (2019) in second and third graders, by Chrysochoou and Bablekou (2011) in 5- to 9-year-olds, or by Potocki et al (2013) in 5-year-olds, for instance. In contrast, Currie and Cain (2015) found that VSTM made significant contributions to local and global inference making, skills closely related to and arguably part of listening comprehension, in 6-year-olds, and to global inference making in 10-year-olds, but not in 8-year-olds.…”

What Do Phonological Processing Errors Tell About Students’ Skills in Reading, Writing, and Oral Language?

“…Researchers found age differences between phonological memory digit recall, word list matching and recall, and non-word recall related to listening comprehension (Chrysochoou & Bablekou, 2011). The link between the two, however, may be more applicable to poor readers in Grades 2 to 4 (Mann, Cowin, & Schoenheimer, 1989; Wise, Sevcik, Morris, Lovett, & Wolf, 2007).…”