Persistence of Memory for Ignored Lists of Digits: Areas of Developmental Constancy and Change

doi:10.1006/jecp.1999.2546

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 76, Issue 2, June 2000, Pages 151-172

https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1999.2546 Get rights and content

Abstract

Contrary to the common belief that sensory memory remains unchanged across development in childhood, there have been several previous reports suggesting that the persistence of sensory memory, at least for sounds, increases with age in childhood. Because those previous studies all used isolated sounds as stimuli, it is not yet clear how this developmental difference influences the recall of sound series. The present study adapts the procedure of J. S. Saults and N. Cowan (1996), who studied memory for attended and ignored spoken words, to examine here the recall of attended and ignored lists of digit. A developmental increase in the persistence of memory was obtained only for the final item in an ignored list, which is the item for which sensory memory is thought to be the most vivid at short retention intervals.

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This study investigates the hypothesis that verbal short-term memory growth in young children can be explained by increases in long-term linguistic knowledge. To this aim, we compare children’s recall of nonwords varying in phonotactic probability. If our assumption holds, there should be growth in recall of high-probability nonwords, but no or less growth in recall of low-probability nonwords. Monolingual and bilingual children are compared to see if bilingual children who have less phonotactic knowledge of the target language (Dutch) show different growth patterns than their monolingual peers. Participants were 72 monolingual Dutch children and 69 bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with Dutch as their non-dominant language. Children were assessed at four, five and six years of age. At all ages, they completed serial nonword recall tasks containing Dutch-based high- and low-probability nonwords. They also performed a series of control measures, including a Dutch receptive vocabulary task. Latent Growth Modeling was used to model the data. A model with clear improvement in children’s recall of high-probability nonwords, but no improvement in recall of low-probability nonwords in both groups, and equal gains of recall of high-probability nonwords in the two groups, gave good fit to the data. These results indicate that (i) verbal short-term memory growth can be explained by increases in long-term phonotactic knowledge and (ii) bilingual children with lower levels of phonotactic knowledge in the target language benefit from such knowledge to the same degree as monolingual children.
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^☆: This research was supported by NICHD Grant R01-HD21338. We thank Nate Fristoe for discussion and we thank Igor Ponomarev for programming.

^☆☆: Address correspondence to Nelson Cowan, Department of Psychology, 210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211. E-mail: [email protected].

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Regular ArticlePersistence of Memory for Ignored Lists of Digits: Areas of Developmental Constancy and Change☆,☆☆

Abstract

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Memory and Language

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Working memory

Children's thinking: Developmental function and individual differences

The development of memory strategies

Perception and communication

Different roles of acoustic and articulatory information in short-term memory

Journal of Experimental Psychology

Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Serial-position effects in infants' recognition memory

Memory & Cognition

Attention and memory: An integrated framework

Temporal properties of memory for speech in preschool children

Memory and Cognition

Properties of memory for unattended spoken syllables

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition

The role of attention in the development of short-term memory: Age differences in the verbal span of apprehension

Child Development

Memory for speech

The role of absolute and relative amounts of time in forgetting within immediate memory: The case of tone pitch comparisons

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Two separate verbal processing rates contributing to short-term memory span

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Regular Article
Persistence of Memory for Ignored Lists of Digits: Areas of Developmental Constancy and Change☆,☆☆