Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a causal connection?

The phonological memory skills of a group of children with disordered language development were compared with those of two control groups, one group matched on verbal abilities and the other matched on nonverbal intelligence. The language-disordered children were poorer at repeating single nonwords and recalling word lists than even the younger children of matched verbal abilities. The language-disordered children were, however, sensitive to both the phonological similarity and word length of the memory lists, except for the longest lists. The results of two further experiments indicate that the poor memory performance of the language-disordered children is unlikely to be due to either impaired perceptual processing or to slow articulation rates. Our proposal is that a deficit of phonological storage in working memory may underpin the poor memory performance of the language-disordered children, and could play a central role in their disordered language development.