Acoustic pattern recognition and short-term memory in normal adults and young children.

Our experiments were aimed at determining if the delayed matching-to-sample paradigm (DMS) could be used to study short-term acoustic recognition memory in young children and whether or not differences exist between children and adults. Our results indicate that the DMS paradigm can produce reliable data in young children. The decay of acoustic information over time was equivalent in both children and adults, beginning at about 1 s and lasting for longer than 10 s. With 7-element acoustic frequency-pattern sequences, a performance difference between children and adults was observed which appears explicable on the basis of longer memory spans in the adult subjects. When we equated for span length, this effect was no longer apparent.