Short-term memory and working memory in children as a function of language-specific knowledge in English and Spanish
Section snippets
Participants
Ninety children from a small town in Southern California participated in both grades 1 and 2. These students came from two schools within the same school district and were part of a larger longitudinal project. The children ranged in age from 5 to 7 years (M = 6.2, S.D. = .4) in grade 1 and from 7 to 8.1 years (M = 7.4, S.D. = .4) in grade 2. The sample included 49 boys and 41 girls. The socioeconomic status, based on family income was low, as 54% of the parents surveyed from the intervention cohort
Total sample
Means and standard deviations for all measures are shown as a function of the total sample (Table 1) and by vocabulary ability (Table 2).
Discussion
The aim of this paper was to test whether STM was language dependent and WM language independent. The results show that phonological STM is language dependent. Children with higher English vocabulary had higher scores on English STM measures than those with lower vocabulary and children with higher Spanish vocabulary had higher scores on Spanish STM measures than those with low Spanish vocabulary. These results are consistent with a body of literature showing associations between children's
Acknowledgments
This study was part of a longitudinal project funded by the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute (grant # 02-02CY-01CG-R) to H. Lee Swanson. The first wave of the study was published in Swanson et al. (2004) and should be consulted for further description of the sample. This project is a subcomponent of the La Patera project, University of California-Santa Barbara. The La Patera project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language
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Rethinking bilingual enhancement effects in associative learning of foreign language vocabulary: The role of proficiency in the mediating language
2020, Journal of Memory and LanguageCitation Excerpt :Although we did not measure working memory, we considered the implications. Both monolingual and bilingual children with better phonological working memory develop more extensive vocabulary in their native languages (e.g., Gathercole, Service, Hitch, Adams, & Martin, 1999; Lanfranchi & Swanson, 2005; Swanson, Orosco, & Lussier, 2011) and non-native languages (Lanfranchi & Swanson, 2005; Swanson et al., 2011). Bilingual young adults also exhibit a strong correlation between phonological working memory span and native language vocabulary (Kaushanskaya, Blumenfeld, & Marian, 2011).
The cognitive development of young dual language learners: A critical review
2014, Early Childhood Research QuarterlyCitation Excerpt :Typically these studies used simple digit span measures and found no differences between monolingual and bilingual children. Studies that set out to specifically investigate memory abilities in bilingual children have been conducted in the United States (Brito & Barr, 2012; Lanfranchi & Swanson, 2005) and the Netherlands (Messer, Leseman, Boom, & Mayo, 2010). Lanfranchi and Swanson examined short-term memory (i.e., passive storage of information) and working memory (i.e., storage plus active processing of information) capacity in English and Spanish in 6-year-old children who received formal instruction in English at school and typically spoke either Spanish or a combination of Spanish and English at home.
The role of working and short-term memory in predicting receptive vocabulary in monolingual and sequential bilingual children
2019, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism