This study investigated the relationship between narrative skills and working memory in typically developing children and children with language delay. The macrostructure of narrative was analyzed through story grammar scores, and the microstructure w...
This study investigated the relationship between narrative skills and working memory in typically developing children and children with language delay. The macrostructure of narrative was analyzed through story grammar scores, and the microstructure was measured using measures of mean length of utterance (MLU-m), number of different words (NDW), and syntactic complexity (T-unit). Additionally, this study aimed to identify the cognitive variables related to narrative skills, specifically phonological working memory, spatial working memory, and the episodic buffer.
A total of 112 children in the age range of 6-10 years from Seoul participated in the study, with 81 being typically developing children and 31 having delayed language development. All participants completed tasks related to narrative production, recall, and working memory.
The study’s results revealed that the typically developing children group showed significantly higher scores in story grammar, lexical diversity (NDW), and syntactic complexity (MLU) compared to the group with delayed language development. Additionally, the typically developing children group demonstrated a significantly higher performance in non-word repetition, the matrix task, and word list recall tasks compared to the language delay group. Within the typically developing children group, significant positive correlations were observed between the lexical diversity and episodic buffer, as well as between the visuospatial working memory and narrative recall task. In the language delay group, a significant positive correlation was found between story grammar scores in the narrative production task and episodic buffer. A positive correlation between mean length of utterance in the production task and spatial working memory was found.. Additionally, the episodic buffer significantly predicted lexcial diversity and story grammar.