Immediate Verbal Memory and Linguistic Sophistication in a Group of Six-Year-Old Children

Thirty-three six-year-olds were given an immediate memory task, the material for which consisted of various orders of statistical approximation to English, plus extracts from actual text. The children were found to differ in the extent to which they utilised the available contextual constraint as an aid to recall, and these differences were shown to be associated with the level of linguistic sophistication reached by the children on several established tests of language development. In addition to these tests, a newly devised test of " linguistic restructuring" was administered to the children. The results of this test showed a significant degree of relationship between linguistic restructuring and immediate recall, and they also seemed to be related to performance on the statistical approximations task.