TOPIC: CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENTS FREQUENTLY HAVE POOR WORKING MEMORY SKILLS

By: Stephanie da Costa Major: Speech-Language and Hearing Sciences (Speech Pathology)

SUMMARY

In the article, Assessment and Treatment of Working Memory Deficits in School-Age Children: The Role of the Speech-Language Pathologist, the authors Donna Boudreau and Amy Constanza-Smith set out to review research done on the relationship between Working Memory(WM) and language development. They wanted to know how well children with these problems did in school. They also looked into what speech-language pathologists could do to help in terms of assessment and in helping them with the demands of needing a good WM in the classroom. They concluded that children with poor WM skills will most likely deal with difficulties in academic settings and will need the help of a speech-language pathologist to do well.

CHART
-Nonword Repetition: Was designed to assess the phonological memory abilities of Preschoolers. They were told that they would hear a funny made-up word and that they had to try and copy it exactly. They were scored correct if they managed to produce the same phonemes as the person who had spoken the funny word and incorrect if there were too many differences in the phonemes.

-Articulation Session: children were asked to repeat a word back 3 times, not all complied so articulation was calculated as the mean number of words per second formed by each child for one repetition. -Receptive Vocabulary: Three items were shown to the children, and they had to identify the correct item that went with the word spoken to them. High- Good WM Low- Bad WM

14 12 10

8
6 4 2 0 Nonword Nonword Articulation Receptive Repition Repition Rate Vocabulary Session 1 Session 2 Session 1 Session 1 high low

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Article: Assessment and Treatment of Working Memory Deficits in School-Age Children: The Role of the Speech-Language Pathologist by Donna
Boudreau and Amy Constanza-Smith.

Chart Information From Article: Phonological Working Memory and Speech Production in Preschool Children by Anne-Marie Adams and Susan E.
Gathercole.

Both can be found on Ebsco.