title: Role of auditory non-verbal working memory in sentence repetition for bilingual children with primary language impairment.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Sentence repetition performance is attracting increasing interest as a valuable clinical marker for primary (or specific) language impairment (LI) in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Multiple aspects of memory appear to contribute to sentence repetition performance, but non-verbal memory has not yet been considered.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To explore the relationship between a measure of non-verbal auditory working memory (NVWM) and sentence repetition performance in a sample of bilingual children with LI.
  
  
  METHODS
  Forty-seven school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children with LI completed sentence repetition and non-word repetition tasks in both Spanish and English as well as an NVWM task. Hierarchical multiple linear regression was used to predict sentence repetition in each language using age, non-word repetition and NVWM.
  
  
  RESULTS
  NVWM predicted unique variance in sentence repetition performance in both languages after accounting for chronological age and language-specific phonological memory, as measured by non-word repetition.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Domain-general memory resources play a unique role in sentence repetition performance in children with LI. Non-verbal working memory weaknesses may contribute to the poor performance of children with LI on sentence repetition tasks.
authors.affiliation: Rush University, Department of Communication Disorders & Sciences, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Kerry Danahy
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Ebert
mesh_terms: D002641:Chicago; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004519:Education, Special; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy*; D007807:Language Tests; D007808:Language Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D019303:Multilingualism; D010898:Pitch Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning
keywords: bilingualism; developmental language impairment; non-linguistic processing; school-aged children; specific language impairment; working memory