Presenter

Farzaneh Anjomshoae, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

Abstract

The digit span (DS) and nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have been used to measure verbal working memory capacity for many decades . In the digit span task, participants are asked to remember a series of numbers in random order. Because the task involves number words, it may require knowledge of a particular language. Among adults, performance on the digit span task is weakly related, at best, to language knowledge. In the NWR task on the other hand, participants are asked to remember some pseudo words and repeat them, which may require some language knowledge in children, since nonwords follow phonotactics. The aim of the present study was to examine whether digit span and nonword repetition are language-knowledge-free tasks among bilingual and monolingual children. The bilingual children in this study were French- and Mandarin-English bilingual children (N=71), and monolinguals were 35 English-speaking children, who were 4- to 6- years old. They were asked to complete forward and backward digit span and nonword repetition tasks and vocabulary tests. The results showed no difference between group means for digit span task, despite the bilingual children scoring lower on vocabulary in English than the monolinguals. Also, once age was controlled for, there were no correlations between vocabulary scores and performance on the digit span task. With respect to NWR, there was an association between vocabulary and NWR performance only among Mandarin-English children. These results suggest that within this age range, digit span is largely independent from language proficiency. The results have important clinical implications about the use of DS and NWR tasks in language development in both bilingual and monolingual children.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

F. Anjomshoae, E. Nicoladis (Psychology Department, University of Alberta)