The role of working memory in children's ability for prosodic discrimination

Abstract

Previous research established that young children are sensitive to prosodic cues discriminating between syntactic structures of otherwise similarly sounding sentences in a language unknown to them. In this study, we explore the role of working memory that children might deploy for the purpose of the sentence-level prosodic discrimination. Nine-year old Slovenian monolingual and bilingual children (N = 70) were tested on a same-different prosodic discrimination task in a language unknown to them (French) and on the working memory measures in the form of forward and backward digit span and non-word repetition tasks. The results suggest that both the storage and processing components of the working memory are involved in the prosodic discrimination task.

Explicit Instruction and Executive Functioning Capacity: A New Direction in Cognitive Load Theory

“…Executive function is a cognitive process involved in higher-order thinking which consists of core components: working memory, inhibitory control, and shifting / cognitive flexibility (Diamond, 2013; Friedman & Miyake, 2016; Miyake et al, 2000; Miyake & Friedman, 2012). Working memory is the speed of processing and manipulating relevant information through efforts to focus attention (Aben et al, 2012; Baddeley, 2012; Oberauer, 2019; Stepanov et al, 2020). Inhibitory control shows efforts to focus attention to inhibit responses and irrelevant information that competes with irrelevant information (Borragan et al, 2018; Perri, 2020; Tiego et al, 2018).…”

Revisión Sistemática: Implicaciones de la Memoria de Trabajo en el neurodesarrollo y el aprendizaje

“…Fernández; Duarte, 2016). Como explicación a lo anterior, varios estudios han encontrado la correlación de la MCP verbal y la MT verbal que dan lugar a interiorizar el lenguaje, involucrando la adquisición de la gramática y el vocabulario tanto del lenguaje nativo como de un segundo idioma (Verhagen & Leseman, 2016), además del papel crucial que juega la discriminación prosódica dentro del aprendizaje en niños (Stepanov, Kodrič & Stateva, 2020). Desde la comprensión escrita, la MT procesa los datos previos adquiridos con nueva información, lo que permite entender y ampliar el significado de la lectura, por lo tanto un mayor dominio de la interpretación (Barreyro, Injoque, Álvarez, Formoso & Burin, 2017), y al relacionar esto a un aspecto atencional, se verá ligada de manera reiterada a elegir si una información es relevante o no (Canet, Andrés, Demagistri & Mascarello, 2015).…”

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language

“…When recruited, working memory can also transfer information received during the task to long-term storage, and thus plays an important role in learning 39 . Working memory ability is correlated with performance on rhythmic synchronisation tasks 40 , prosodic perception 41 , ability to distinguish between prosodically deviant sentences 42 , and also with sensitivity to morphosyntactic and grammatical violations 43 , 44 . Further, just as for prosody, musical ability and training have been shown to correlate with higher working memory spans 45 , 46 .…”

“…When recruited, working memory can also transfer information received during the task to long-term storage, and thus plays an important role in learning 39 . Working memory ability is correlated with performance on rhythmic synchronisation tasks 40 , prosodic perception 41 , ability to distinguish between prosodically deviant sentences 42 , Individual differences analysis. We used assessments of expressive grammar, musical rhythm perception, prosodic perception, and verbal working memory as the behavioural variables for the individual differences analyses.…”