Short-Term Memory Performance in 7- and 8-Year-Old Children: The Relationship between Phonological and Pitch Processing

• Published in: Journal of speech, language, and hearing research Vol. 59; no. 5; pp. 1208 - 1217
• Main Authors: Flagge, Ashley Gaal, Estis, Julie M, Moore, Robert E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 01.10.2016
• Subjects: Accuracy; Child; Children; Correlation; Female; Grammar, Comparative and general; Humans; Imitation; Imitative Behavior; Language Acquisition; Language disorders; Language Impairments; Male; Memory, Short-Term; Music; Neuropsychological Tests; Phonetics; Phonology; Pitch Discrimination; Psychological aspects; Psychology, Child; Recall; Repetition; Scores; Short term; Short Term Memory; Speech; Studies; Suprasegmentals; Testing; Tonality; Young Children
• ISSN: 1092-4388; 1558-9102
• DOI: 10.1044/2016_JSLHR-H-14-0317

Purpose: The relationship between short-term memory for phonology and pitch was explored by examining accuracy scores for typically developing children for 5 experimental tasks: immediate nonword repetition (NWR), nonword repetition with an 8-s silent interference (NWRS), pitch discrimination (PD), pitch discrimination with an 8-s silent interference (PDS), and pitch matching (PM). Method: Thirty-six 7- and 8-year-old children (21 girls, 15 boys) with normal hearing, language, and cognition were asked to listen to and repeat nonsense words (NWR, NWRS), make a same versus different decision between 2 tones (PD, PDS), and listen to and then vocally reproduce a tone (PM). Results: Results showed no significant correlations between tasks of phonological memory and tests of pitch memory, that participants scored significantly better on nonword repetition tasks than PD and PM tasks, and that participants performed significantly better on tasks with no silent interference. Discussion: These findings suggest that, for typically developing children, pitch may be stored and rehearsed in a separate location than phonological information. Because of fundamental task differences, further research is needed to corroborate these data and determine the presence of developmental effects and neuroanatomical locations where a potential language/music overlap is occurring in children.