working memory

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Despina and Info-CHILDES,

   Regarding you question about tests of working memory.  A recently
published working memory test for children can be found in:

Swanson, H. L. (1996). Individual and age related differences in children's
working memory. Memory and Cognition, 24, 70-82.

In an article now in press in Child Development, Booth, MacWhinney and
Harasaki used both the Swanson working memory measure and a digit span test
to predict patterns in the development of sentence comprehension in children
aged 8 through 11.  We found that the d-span test was typically better than
the working memory test at predicting patterns of individual difference.

--Brian MacWhinney