Open AccessThe role of working memory in children's ability for prosodic discrimination
Author(s) -
Arthur Stepanov,
Karmen Brina Kodrič,
Penka Stateva
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229857
Subject(s) - working memory , task (project management) , sentence , repetition (rhetorical device) , memory span , psychology , word (group theory) , short term memory , cognitive psychology , computer science , linguistics , cognition , natural language processing , neuroscience , economics , philosophy , management
Previous research established that young children are sensitive to prosodic cues discriminating between syntactic structures of otherwise similarly sounding sentences in a language unknown to them. In this study, we explore the role of working memory that children might deploy for the purpose of the sentence-level prosodic discrimination. Nine-year old Slovenian monolingual and bilingual children (N = 70) were tested on a same-different prosodic discrimination task in a language unknown to them (French) and on the working memory measures in the form of forward and backward digit span and non-word repetition tasks. The results suggest that both the storage and processing components of the working memory are involved in the prosodic discrimination task.