Sentence Comprehension and Short-Term Memory : Some Developmental Considerations

Four types of stimuli—digit strings, noun phrases plus digit strings, intransitive sentences plus digit strings, and transitive sentences plus digit strings—were presented to subjects for immediate recall. Three groups of subjects were tested: 20 seven-year olds, 20 ten-year olds, and 20 adults. Sentence recall errors and digit spans for each condition are considered in terms of the age of the subjects. Analyses indicate that while digit span for the digit only condition shows a steadily rising function across ages, digit spans for the verbal conditions show irregular slopes, the conditions changing relative positions across ages. Discussion of the results centres on the separate aspects of the maturational increase in short-term memory and the acquisition of linguistic mediational strategies (i.e., " chunking ").