title: Who's Who? Memory updating and character reference in children's narratives.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The capacity to update and monitor the contents of working memory is an executive function presumed to play a critical role in language processing. The current study used an individual differences approach to consider the relationship between memory updating and accurate reference to story characters in the narratives of typically developing children.
  
  
  METHODS
  English-speaking children from kindergarten to grade 2 ( N = 63; M age = 7.0 years) completed updating tasks, short-term memory tasks, and narrative productions. The authors used multiple regression to test whether updating accounted for independent variability in referential adequacy.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The capacity to update working memory was related to adequate character reference beyond the effects of age and of short-term memory capacity, with the strongest relationship emerging for maintaining reference over multiple utterances.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This individual differences study is the first to show a link between updating and performance in a discourse production task for young school-age children. The findings contribute to the growing body of research investigating the role of working memory in shaping language production. This study invites extension to children of different ages and language abilities as well as to other language production tasks.
authors.affiliation: Correspondence to Paola Colozzo: paola.colozzo@audiospeech.ubc.ca.
authors.forename: Cristy
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Whitely
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Colozzo
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D033262:Narration; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012044:Regression Analysis
keywords: executive functions; narrative production; reference; school-age children; working memory