There is a growing body of evidence indicating the involvement of phonological memory
in children’s vocabulary acquisition. Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) in a longitudinal
study, measured the vocabulary level and the phonological memory of 4- and 5- year-old
children. The phonological memory measure used in that study involved the repetition
of single non-words. They found that vocabulary scores were highly correlated with
phonological memory scores at age four and five.
In another study, Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) studied new vocabulary learning in an
experimental setting. They explored the possibility of a causal relationship between
phonological memory and vocabulary acquisition by testing the abilities of children high
and low in repetition performance, to Ieam labels for unfamiliar toy animals. In this study,
children were presented with novel toys which were given specific names. They were
either familiar boys’ names (e.g., Thomas, Michael) or invented two syllable words (e.g.,
Meton, Pimas). The task was simply to Ieam the name to go with each toy. First, the
children were repeating the names and they were asked to give a label for them. The low
repetition children were found to be slower at learning phonologically unfamiliar names
such as " Pimas" for the toys, although there was no difference in learning speed for
familiar names such as "Thomas". The two groups also differed one week later in their
retention of labels that had initially been learned. These results suggest that immediate
memory processes are directly involved in the learning of new vocabulary items in young
children.
Michas and Henry (1994) also, investigated whether phonological memory could predict
children’s ability to Ieam new words. The children were introduced incidentally to a new
colour term, followed by the explicit instraction of three new words and their definitions.
The children were then tested on word production, comprehension and recall of the
definitions immediately and one week later. Phonological memory was found to be a
significant predictor of the ability to Ieam new words as tested by production and delayed
comprehension measures for explicitly taught words. However, it did not predict word
learning for the incidentally introduced words. The fact that phonological memory
predicted word learning for the explicitly taught but not the incidentally introduced words,
raises questions about the findings. Maybe other factors such as the specific instruction,
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