Verbal Short‐Term Memory Underlies Typical Development of “Thought Organization” Measured as Speech Connectedness

Abstract

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of education than by age. Among beginning readers, the LSC of stories composed of short‐term memory predicted reading independently from IQ. Here we set out to test a longitudinal sample (6–8 years old, n = 45, followed for 2 years) to verify whether the LSC is predictive of various memory measures, and whether such relations can explain the correlation with reading. The LSC was specifically correlated with verbal short‐term memory performance. The results support the notion that the short‐term storage of verbal information is necessary to plan a story. Given the limited sample size, the relationship of this interaction with reading remains inconclusive.

Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion

“…Importantly, changes in non-semantic structural connectedness were not observed. Such changes have been previously associated with cognitive impairments in psychosis [ 32 , 34 , 35 ] or during typical cognitive development [ 33 , 50 , 51 ], and therefore were not expected to be found in healthy adult individuals such as those sampled here.…”

Network analysis of narrative discourse and attention-deficit hyperactivity symptoms in adults

“…Those results suggest that the more ADHD symptoms the individual has, the more he presents short-range recurrences and fewer long-range recurrences. In typical children, less long-range recurrences (i.e., connectedness) correlated with lower IQ and lower verbal memory as well as worse performance on tasks addressing theory of mind [ 52 , 54 ]; increased connectedness has been associated with higher reading abilities and higher educational levels [ 29 , 52 ]. To date, there are no studies addressing the clinical correlates of lower connectedness in ADHD.…”

The Effects of Early Biliteracy on Thought Organisation and Syntactic Complexity in Written Production by 11-Year-Old Children

“…Recently, network science and graph theory have gained increasing attention in the fields of neuroscience (Mota et al, 2012(Mota et al, , 2014, psycholinguistics (Luz, 2018) and education (Mota et al, 2016(Mota et al, , 2019. Mota et al (2016Mota et al ( , 2019 have conducted a series of experiments relying on graph analysis in order to explain cognitive development in healthy children as they progressed in their educational path through elementary school.…”

“…Recently, network science and graph theory have gained increasing attention in the fields of neuroscience (Mota et al, 2012(Mota et al, , 2014, psycholinguistics (Luz, 2018) and education (Mota et al, 2016(Mota et al, , 2019. Mota et al (2016Mota et al ( , 2019 have conducted a series of experiments relying on graph analysis in order to explain cognitive development in healthy children as they progressed in their educational path through elementary school. Results showed that children whose oral memory reports generated graphs with more unique nodes (that denotes a larger vocabulary), more connections and fewer repetitions were the ones who scored higher in the cognitive and academic assessments, thus demonstrating the predictive power of graph analysis.…”

“…Participants were asked to create a narrative based on a sequence of five images (Cambridge Assessment, 2018), being one in English and one in Portuguese, in a counterbalanced order. Thought organisation (connectivity) was measured through the analysis of graph trajectories performed with the computational tool Speech Graphs (Mota et al, 2014(Mota et al, , 2016(Mota et al, , 2019 and the analysis of syntactic complexity involved the assessment of T-Units (Hunt, 1965). Results indicated a moderate positive correlation in the attributes of thought connectivity and the levels of syntactic complexity in both languages, demonstrating that, as children advance in the development of more complex writing strategies in Portuguese, they progress in their written production in English to the same extent.…”