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Article published In:
Language, Interaction and Acquisition
Vol. 10:2 (2019) ► pp.141–176

Syntax and working memory in typically-developing children

Focus on syntactic complexity

| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva

A growing trend in developmental psycholinguistics is to relate linguistic development to the development of other cognitive systems. Jakubowicz (2005, 2011) in particular argued that the processing of a complex sentence requires considerable working memory (WM) resources and that these resources are limited in young children, which would explain their non-adult grammar. The present research aims to clarify the relationship between WM and complex syntax, in comprehension, repetition, and spontaneous production, in 48 typically-developing children aged 5 to 12. Our results demonstrate a strong age effect for all measures of WM and syntax. They also reveal strong correlations between scores on simple and complex spans and syntactic performance. Finally, we show the highly predictive value of WM capacities on the acquisition of syntactic skills in both comprehension and production. In particular, the complex-span task, measuring counting span, explains the largest part of the variance in the spontaneous production of embedded clauses.

Keywords: syntax, working memory, children, syntactic complexity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Syntactic complexity: Focus on syntactic movement and embedding
    • 1.2Working memory: Focus on simple/complex spans
    • 1.3Working memory and complex syntax
    • 1.4Aim and prediction of the present study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Working memory tasks
    • 2.3Syntactic tasks
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Performance on individual experimental tasks: Working memory
    • 3.2Performance on individual experimental tasks: Complex syntax
    • 3.3Correlation analyses
    • 3.4Regression analyses
    • 3.5Further examination of syntactic complexity
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.18013.del
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2021. Neuro-cognitive development of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping in 6- to 7.5-year-old children. NeuroImage 241 ► pp. 118416 ff. DOI logo

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