Abstract :
We examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or
language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence–picture matching
tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic
difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term memory (STM) skills and their relation
to sentence comprehension performance were also examined. When WM load was minimized, the
LI group performed more poorly on the sentence comprehension task compared to the age-matched
control group and the dyslexic group. Across groups, sentence comprehension performance generally
decreased as the WM load increased, but this effect was somewhat more pronounced in the dyslexic
group compared to the age-matched group. Moreover, both the LI and dyslexic groups showed poor
phonological STM compared to the age-matched control group, and a significant correlation was
observed between phonological STM and sentence comprehension performance under demanding
WM loads. The results indicate subtle sentence processing difficulties in dyslexia that might be
explained as resulting from these children’s phonological STM limitations.
