Memory Capacity in School-Age Mandarin-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment

學齡期特定型語言障礙兒童的記憶容量

本研究以三種不同的實驗作業測試了十位年約七歲的特定型語言障礙（SLI）兒童的記憶容量。作為對比的有兩個控制組：年齡對照組和語言能力對照組。兩個對照組各有十位發展正常的兒童。三個實驗作業分別是：（一）物件位置，（二）物件名稱，（三）語詞記憶。結果發現在三個作業中，SLI兒童的表現只有在「物件位置」比年齡對照組差，其餘兩個作業沒有顯著的差異。跟語言能力對照組相比，兩組的表現相若。我們的資料顯示這些SLI兒童的記憶缺陷是在物件的順序關係而非在處理語音訊息。不過我們也發現在兩個非語言的記憶作業中，大多數的兒童在作業開始後不久，就會低聲唸出眼前物件的名稱。因此兩個空間記憶工作也就摻入了語言的因素。SLI兒童在物件位置作業中表現不佳，可能是因為他們不能利用口語線索來提昇自己的表現。因此他們的記憶問題仍然與語言有關。

Ten school-age Mandarin-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) were tested with three memory tasks: (1) a position probe task, (2) a missing object task and (3) a word span task. Two control groups, one age-matched and one language-matched, were also tested. In the three tasks, children with SLI performed significantly poorer than the age-matched controls only in the object position probe task, a test on spatial memory. When compared with the younger language-matched controls, the SLI group performed at the same level in all three tasks. These findings indicated that these school-age children with SLI suffered a deficit in memorizing spatial positions of an array of objects but not in their memory for verbal stimuli. During the experiment, it was also observed that most children, both SLI and normally developing controls, did vocally or sub-vocally rehearse the stimuli in the two spatial memory tasks. Therefore, it is very likely that they had converted the spatial memory tasks into verbal memory tasks and thus the deficit our SLI subjects displayed is still verbal in nature.