Developmental Changes in Short-term Memory: A Revised Working Memory Perspective

This chapter discusses thinking about the nature of short-term memory, and put forward some of our own speculations about children’s rehearsal. The use of rehearsal to help maintain verbal material has long been considered to be one of the most important features in the adult short-term memory system. The working memory model of short-term memory introduced by A. Baddeley and Graham J. Hitch has proved to be a useful theoretical tool, both for accommodating memory phenomena such as the phonological similarity and word length effects, and for characterising the developmental changes in short-term memory function. In order to construct a more complete account of short-term memory development than either hypothesis provides alone, the phonological readout process can readily be considered to be part of the primitive rehearsal mechanism. The phonological representations have to be sequentially read and translated into abstract articulatory commands, which are then used to guide the movements of speech musculature necessary to produce the target phonological form.