Montgomery J W
Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27599-7255, USA.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2000 Apr;43(2):293-308. doi: 10.1044/jslhr.4302.293.
In this study we examined the influence of verbal working memory on sentence comprehension in children with SLI. Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive vocabulary (VM) completed two tasks. In the verbal working memory task, children recalled as many real words as possible under three processing load conditions (i.e., no-load condition; single-load condition, where words were recalled according to physical size of word referents; and dual-load condition, where words were recalled by semantic category and physical size of word referents). In the sentence comprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant (shorter) and linguistically redundant (longer) sentences. Results of the memory task showed that the children with SLI recalled fewer words in the dual-load condition than their CA peers, who showed no condition effect. The SLI and VM groups performed similarly overall, but both groups showed poorer recall in the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. On the sentence comprehension task, children with SLI comprehended fewer sentences of both types than the CA children and fewer redundant sentences relative to themselves and to the VM children. Results were interpreted to suggest that children with SLI (a) have less functional verbal working memory capacity (i.e., ability to coordinate both storage and processing functions) than their CA peers and (b) have greater difficulty managing both their working memory abilities and general processing resources than both age peers and younger children when performing a "complex" off-line sentence processing task.
在本研究中，我们考察了言语工作记忆对特定语言障碍（SLI）儿童句子理解的影响。12名患有SLI的儿童、12名年龄匹配的正常发育儿童（CA）以及12名接受性词汇匹配的儿童（VM）完成了两项任务。在言语工作记忆任务中，儿童在三种加工负荷条件下尽可能多地回忆真实单词（即无负荷条件；单负荷条件，根据单词所指对象的物理大小回忆单词；双负荷条件，根据单词所指对象的语义类别和物理大小回忆单词）。在句子理解任务中，儿童听语言上非冗余（较短）和语言上冗余（较长）的句子。记忆任务的结果表明，患有SLI的儿童在双负荷条件下回忆的单词比年龄匹配的同龄人少，而年龄匹配的同龄人没有条件效应。SLI组和VM组总体表现相似，但两组在双负荷条件下比其他条件下的回忆表现更差。在句子理解任务中，患有SLI的儿童理解的两种类型的句子都比CA儿童少，相对于他们自己和VM儿童，理解的冗余句子也更少。结果表明，患有SLI的儿童（a）比年龄匹配的同龄人具有更低的功能性言语工作记忆容量（即协调存储和加工功能的能力），并且（b）在执行“复杂”的离线句子加工任务时，比年龄匹配的同龄人和年幼儿童在管理工作记忆能力和一般加工资源方面有更大的困难。
