Young children's use of the speech code in a recall task

Abstract

Electromyographic (EMG) and sound recordings were taken from 12 4- and 5-year-old males and females during a recall task in which they saw pictures whose names contained or did not contain labial phonemes. Subvocalization, suggested primarily by labial-nonlabial tracing discrepancies, occurred during picture presentation but not during a subsequent rehearsal period which preceded Ss' oral recall. The relevance of these findings to mediational- and production-deficiency hypotheses in young children, the implications of implicit speech for short-term memory coding, and the use of EMG as a technique in the study of verbal mediation, are discussed.