The influence of children’s exposure to language from two to six years: The case of nonword repetition

What is it about?

Nonword repetition has traditionally been viewed as a measure of short-term memory that shows strong correlations across many language measures, thus implicating short-term memory in language learning. This paper shows that in fact, nonword repetition is a measure of the child's current linguistic competence rather than reflecting a short-term memory capacity constraint.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Along with Jones and Macken (2015), we show that traditional measures of short-term memory primarily reflect long-term learning. This has implications for the plethora of papers that have drawn conclusions relating to the involvement of short-term memory across a wide-range of domains.