Reference values of nonword repetition test for Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Abstract

Evaluation of the phonological working memory (PWM) through repetition of nonwords can provide important information on the linguistic abilities of children, thus differentiating those with and without communication disorders. Objective: The aim of this study was to obtain reference values in the Nonword Repetition Test (NWRT) in order to investigate the performance of children without language disorders concerning this type of memory. Material and Methods: The study was conducted on 480 normal children of both genders aged 4 years to 8 years and 11 months, attending preschool and elementary school. The NWRT consisted of repeating 20 (children up to 4 years) or 40 (for children aged 5 years or more) invented words with 2 to 5 syllables. The results were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis. Comparison between ages and between the number of syllables in nonwords was performed by the Tukey's multiple-comparison test and one-way analysis of variance, at a significance value of p<0.05. Results: There was statistically significant difference (p<0.05) in performance between children of different age groups, except between 7- and 8-year-olds. The analysis also showed statistically significant difference (p<0.05) in the number of syllables between the different age groups. Conclusions: The reference values obtained indicated an improvement in performance with the increase of age of children, indicating an improvement in the storage of verbal material in the PWM. The performance was worsened with the increase in the number of syllables in words, demonstrating that the greater the number of syllables, the greater is the difficulty in storing verbal material.

Relationship between phonological working memory, metacognitive skills and reading comprehension in children with learning disabilities

“…The phonological working memory was assessed by the Nonword Repetition Test 11 , which evaluates the number of items the individual is able to retain and retrieve in memory, immediately after the oral presentation of a list of nonwords. An appropriate response is considered if the repetition is identical to that presented by the examiner, who is allowed to repeat every word only once.…”

Memory performance, oral comprehension and learning process between children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and children with anxiety disorder

“…In contrast, in easy tasks the rest of working memory capacity would be sufficient to satisfy the demands of the task 26 . This statement may explain why AD children showed their worst performance in this task, since the literature reports that, among the tasks of nonword repetition and direct and backward digit repetition, the latter is the more complex 19 .…”

“…The backward digit subitem is also considered to be more complex since a sbject must store information and perform a complex activity for sequence inversion instead of simply repeating a sequence in the order presented 19 . For this reason, a significant reduction of points is expected for backward order compared to direct order 25 .…”

Intervention Program for Brazilian Children with Language Delay

“…The pilot study had three phases: Pre-intervention assessment-when the children were submited to Brazilian standardize tests [23][24][25][26][27] to assess information about receptive and expressive language in general, auditory working memory, phonology, expressive vocabulary, and auditory discrimination-; intervention application-where are performed 24 sessions of the proposed intervention program-; and, at last, post-intervention assessment-with the same protocol of the pre-intervention assessment. The comparative results, in percentage, of pre and post-intervention assessment are presented in Figure 1.…”