Childrens working-memory processes: A response-timing analysis

Recall response durations were used to clarify processing in working-memory tasks. Experiment 1 examined children’s performance in reading span, a task in which sentences were processed and the final word of each sentence was retained for subsequent recall. Experiment 2 examined the development of listening-, counting-, and digit-span task performance. Responses were much longer in the reading- and listening-span tasks than in the other span tasks, suggesting that participants in sentence-based span tasks take time to retrieve the semantic or linguistic structure as cues to recall of the sentence-final words. Response durations in working-memory tasks helped to predict academic skills and achievement, largely separate from the contributions of the memory spans themselves. Response durations thus are important in the interpretation of span task performance. In working-memory (WM) span tasks, participants carry out sets of problems requiring processing and then recall target items that accompanied the problems, with one target item for each problem. WM-span measures are based on how many items can be recalled in order, after the corresponding problems have been correctly completed. No matter whether the processing task involves sen