Short-term phonological memory in preschool children.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to design a short-term memory test, to describe quantitative performance in typically language developing children and to verify the relationship between the non-words repetition and oral phonological measure. METHODS The participants included 136 typically language developing children aged from 3 years to 6 years and 11 months old in this study, who were evaluated. The test consisted of 40 non-words of one, two, three, and four syllables. The subjects' repetitions were transcribed and the number of right answers was calculated for each age range. RESULTS The effect of age was observed in the test, as well as the effect of length, only for disyllabic non-words. The performance in the non-word repetition task showed correlation with the oral phonology measure. CONCLUSION The test designed in this research was able to verify the short-term memory in typically language developing children and the results showed correlation between this memory and phonological performance.