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James Montgomery has published work with dual load versus no load tasks
assessing working memory in children with and without specific language
impairment. The below is the entry as it appears on Psych-Info:<br><br>
Author(s)<br>
Montgomery, James W.<br>
Title<br>
Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in
children with specific language impairment.<br>
Source<br>
Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research.
Vol 43(2) no. 2 (Apr 2000) p. 293-308<br>
Abstract<br>
Examined the influence of verbal working memory on
sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment
(SLI). Twelve children with SLI (aged 85-126 mo), 12 normally developing
children matched for age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive
vocabulary (VM) completed 2 tasks. In the verbal working memory task,
children recalled as many words as possible under 3 processing load
conditions (no-load; single-load; dual load). In the sentence
comprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant and
linguistically redundant sentences. Results of the memory task showed
that the children with SLI recalled fewer words in the dual-load
condition than their CA peers. The SLI and VM groups performed similarly
overall. 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 suggest that children with SLI (a) have less functional verbal
working memory capacity 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.
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)<br>
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