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935

The
British
Psychological
British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2009), 27, 935–951
q 2009 The British Psychological Society
Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

Listening comprehension in preschoolers:

The role of memory

Elena Florit*, Maja Roch, Gianmarco Altoè and

Maria Chiara Levorato
Department of Developmental and Socialization Psychology, University of Padua,
Padua, Italy

The current study analyzed the relationship between text comprehension and memory
skills in preschoolers. We were interested in verifying the hypothesis that memory is a
specific contributor to listening comprehension in preschool children after controlling
for verbal abilities. We were also interested in analyzing the developmental path of the
relationship between memory skills and listening comprehension in the age range
considered. Forty-four, 4-year-olds (mean age ¼ 4 years and 6 months, SD ¼ 4
months) and 40, 5-year-olds (mean age ¼ 5 years and 4 months, SD ¼ 5 months)
participated in the study. The children were administered measures to evaluate listening
comprehension ability (story comprehension), short-term and working memory skills
(forward and backward word span), verbal intelligence and receptive vocabulary.
Results showed that both short-term and working memory predicted unique and
independent variance in listening comprehension after controlling for verbal abilities,
with working memory explaining additional variance over and above short-term
memory. The predictive power of memory skills was stable in the age range considered.
Results also confirm a strong relation between verbal abilities and listening
comprehension in 4- and 5-year-old children.

Text comprehension is a complex ability that involves the construction of a coherent

mental representation, which organises a set of textual contents and integrates them
with previous world knowledge (for a review, see Gernsbacher, 1994; Kintsch, 1998).
This process of construction is articulated in various phases and involves numerous
components and resources, each of which has the potential to give rise to individual
differences in text comprehension ability (Hannon & Daneman, 2001). Most recent
work has adopted a multicomponent approach, which has made possible an analysis of
the contribution made by the different components and the identification of those
components responsible for individual differences in reading comprehension in school-
age children (e.g. Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant, 2003). In the

* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Elena Florit, Department of Developmental and Socialization Psychology,
University of Padua, 35135 Padua, Italy (e-mail: elena.florit@unipd.it).

DOI:10.1348/026151008X397189
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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936 E. Florit et al.

current study we extended the analysis to listening comprehension in preschoolers aged

between 4 and 6 years. We focused on memory skills and controlled for basic language
skills (i.e. verbal ability and vocabulary knowledge); both of these skills have been
extensively explored and have been shown to be related to reading comprehension (see
Cain & Oakhill, 2007).
There are few studies on text comprehension in preschoolers, which represents a
serious gap in our knowledge of text comprehension development since the ability to
understand short simple texts develops from the fourth year of life. Moreover, listening
comprehension has been shown to contribute to later reading comprehension skills; in
a longitudinal study van den Broek and colleagues (e.g. Kendeou, van den Broek, White,
& Lynch, 2007) found that comprehension of audio and televised stories predicted later
reading comprehension.
It is presumable that the components investigated with reference to reading
comprehension play a role in listening comprehension as well. On the other hand, Cain
and Oakhill (2007) hypothesized that in younger children lower level language skills,
such as vocabulary and syntax, play a fundamental role whereas in the older children
higher level skills, such as inference making or comprehension-monitoring, become
more relevant. Therefore, developmental differences should also be analyzed in
preschoolers’ listening comprehension, before the literacy process begins.

Memory and text comprehension

Many previous studies analyzing individual differences in reading comprehension ability
in childhood have taken into account the role played by memory (e.g. Cain, 2006;
Leather & Henry, 1994; Nation, Adams, Bowyer-Crane, & Snowling, 1999; Seigneuric,
Ehrlich, Oakhill, & Yuill, 2000; Stothard & Hulme, 1992; Swanson & Berninger, 1995).
In these studies, two memory functions were considered: (a) the capacity to store
material over short periods of time in situations that do not impose other competing
cognitive demands (i.e. short-term memory), and (b) the capacity to store information
while engaging in other cognitively demanding activities (i.e. working memory).
Short-term memory was measured by tasks that required information storage, such as
word or digit span tasks. Studies that investigated the relations between reading
comprehension and short-term memory in school-age children obtained mixed results.
Some studies reported that a relation between short-term memory and reading
comprehension existed; these studies considered unselected groups of children
(Goff, Pratt, & Ong, 2005; Hulme, 1988) or compared children with poor text
comprehension skills to children characterized by poor word reading and adequate
comprehension (Shankweiler et al., 1999). Other studies, instead, that compared good
and poor comprehenders found no difference between the two groups with regards to
their short-term memory skills (Stothard & Hulme, 1992; Swanson & Berninger, 1995).
With regards to working memory, two major theoretical approaches can be identified:
the multiple-resources models (Baddeley, 1986; Shah & Miyake, 1996) and the resource-
sharing models (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; Just & Carpenter, 1992). The former
assumes that performance in complex span tasks is supported by a number of subsystems
dedicated to specific processes or domains, whereas the latter assumes that processing
and storage operations compete for a limited pool of working memory resources (for
further details about this debate see Bayliss, Jarrold, Gunn, & Baddeley, 2003).
Daneman and Carpenter (1980) have proposed a model, which is particularly
adequate to describe the processes of text comprehension and has been supported by
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 937

empirical evidence (see Daneman & Merikle, 1996). In this model, working memory is
considered as a unitary system, which carries out both storage and processing functions
of linguistic information. It has limited resources and there is a performance trade off
between processing and storage functions: an increase in the amount of processing
required results in a decrease in the number of items stored. This limitation may result in
coarse text comprehension and is among the causes of individual differences.
Working memory capacity is generally evaluated through complex span tasks, such
as the listening span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). This test requires linguistic
information to be both stored and processed: The participants have to process the
meaning of a series of non-connected sentences and to answer true/false questions
while maintaining the final word of each sentence for later recall.
Studies on groups of good and poor comprehenders and on unselected groups of
children have found a strong relationship between working memory and reading
comprehension (Cain, 2006; Engle, Carullo, & Collins, 1991; Seigneuric et al., 2000;
Swanson & Berninger, 1995) as well as between working memory and many of the skills
involved in text comprehension, such as inference making, anaphoric processing and
use of context (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Ehrlich & Rémond, 1997; Oakill, Cain, &
Yuill, 1998; Yuill & Oakhill, 1988; Yuill, Oakhill, & Parkin, 1989). These studies suggest
that reading comprehension depends in part on the capacity of working memory to
maintain and manipulate information.
Few studies have examined the relation between listening comprehension and
memory in preschoolers. Daneman and Blennerhassett (1984) analyzed short-term,
working memory and their relationship with listening comprehension in children
between 3 and 5 years of age. Short-term memory was evaluated through a word span
task, and working memory through a modified version of the listening span test. They
found that working memory predicted listening comprehension in preschoolers better
than short-term memory, which, however, also correlated with listening comprehen-
sion. It was not possible to prevent the children taking the listening span test from
repeating the entire sentences rather than recalling only the sentence-final words.
Therefore, this study actually demonstrated that the ability to repeat sentences was
related to listening comprehension. However, the relationship between memory and
text comprehension remained unclear.
More recently, Adams, Bourke, and Willis (1999) examined the relationship between
spoken language comprehension, on one hand, and short-term and working memory, on
the other hand, in children aged between 4 years and 6 months, and 5 years and
6 months. Spoken language comprehension was evaluated considering a range of
linguistic components and the ability to draw inferences. Different measures of short-
term memory and a listening span task were used to evaluate memory skills. In the latter
task, in order to avoid the difficulties found by Daneman and Blennerhassett (1984),
children were required to supply the missing final word of sets of unrelated sentences
and then to recall all the final words in each set. The authors found a relation between
spoken language comprehension on one hand, and short-term and working memory
measures, on the other hand. In this study, as well, the children found the listening span
task difficult and produced a very limited range of scores. In sum, the results obtained
with preschool children suggested that complex span tasks, such as the listening span
test, are unsuitable for this population.
Based on these considerations, we decided to analyse the specific role played by
working memory skills in listening comprehension by using a backward word span task,
which seemed to be more suitable with respect to the resources of preschool children.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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938 E. Florit et al.

In order to evaluate short-term memory, we used a forward word span task. Alloway,
Gathercole, and Pickering (2006) used these tasks in a numerical format (forward and
backward digit recall) to evaluate short-term memory and working memory in
preschoolers (see also Alloway, Gathercole, Willis, & Adams, 2004). The two tasks differ
in terms of their processing load: forward digit recall places a minimal processing load
on the child whereas backward digit recall imposes a substantial one. In the current
work, these two memory measures were analyzed in order to disentangle the
contributions made by short-term and working memory respectively to listening
comprehension in preschoolers.

Is the effect of working memory direct or mediated?

Evidence of a relationship between memory (in particular working memory), evaluated
through verbal tasks, and reading comprehension in school-aged children has given rise
to a debate concerning what the nature of that relationship might be. The debate is
based on the consideration that tasks evaluating working memory may tap into verbal
and semantic skills that may underpin the relationship between working memory and
reading comprehension.
It has been extensively demonstrated that verbal ability is strongly related to
individual differences in text comprehension ability in school-age children. Stothard and
Hulme (1996) reported that variation in comprehension skill can largely be accounted
for by variation in verbal intelligence. Vocabulary knowledge is also one of the best
predictors of reading comprehension ability (Ouellette, 2006). Additional evidence for
the influence of this predictor has been provided by longitudinal studies on children
followed from kindergarten to the early grades of elementary school (Muter, Hulme,
Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002) and on school-age
children (de Jong & van der Leij, 2002).
Given the importance of verbal ability in reading comprehension Stothard and Hulme
(1992), suggested that working memory differences among groups of good and poor
comprehenders would disappear if differences in verbal intelligence were controlled.
Nation et al. (1999) also compared groups of good and poor comprehenders and
proposed that working memory’s role is mediated by verbal ability. The authors argued
that poor comprehenders have a semantic weakness that restricts their ability to store
verbal information in short-term memory and impairs performance on verbal complex
span tasks. Their impaired performance on working memory tasks could be due to their
language difficulties, which have a direct impact on their reading and listening
comprehension. This conclusion was supported by the findings that no differences were
found between good and poor comprehenders in spatial complex span tasks.
On the other hand, work that investigated the relations between working memory and
reading comprehension in unselected groups of school-age children, has found that
working memory emerged as a direct predictor of reading comprehension after
controlling for variables related to language comprehension (e.g. Leather & Henry, 1994;
Seigneuric et al., 2000). A recent longitudinal study by Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004)
has found a direct relationship between verbal working memory tasks and reading
comprehension after controlling for verbal skills. Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004)
followed a group of 100 children from 7 to 10 years of age and evaluated their working
memory skills using a sentence span and a numerical working memory task.
Verbal skills were also assessed using two tests of vocabulary knowledge and two
subtests (vocabulary and similarities) from the Wechsler intelligence scale for children.
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 939

Relations were found between the two working memory tasks and reading compre-
hension, with stronger correlations for the sentence span task than for the numerical
task. To analyse whether working memory explained significant variance in reading
comprehension over and above verbal abilities, the authors carried out a hierarchical
regression analysis in which a measure of verbal working memory was entered after
controlling for the contribution of verbal skills to reading comprehension. In each of
the three age groups, working memory explained unique variance over and above the
contributions made by verbal skills. Based on this result, the authors concluded that
verbal skills cannot account entirely for the relationship between reading comprehen-
sion and working memory, which is a specific contributor to reading comprehension.
The current study adopted a methodology similar to that of Cain, Oakhill, and
Bryant (2004); rather than comparing groups of good and poor comprehenders we
considered an unselected group of preschool children and performed a hierarchical
multiple regression analysis to investigate the relationship between text
comprehension and memory. We were interested in verifying the hypothesis that
working memory is a specific contributor to listening comprehension in preschool
children even after controlling for verbal abilities. Moreover, we hypothesized that
also short-term memory plays a role as was found in studies with unselected groups
of school-age and preschool children (Adams et al., 1999; Daneman &
Blennerhassett, 1984; Goff et al., 2005). In sum, we expected to find that both the
functions of storage and storage plus processing are involved in listening comprehension,
with working memory explaining additional variance over and above the contribution of
short-term memory (Leather & Henry, 1994). We were also interested in analyzing the
developmental path of the relationship between memory skills and listening
comprehension from 4 to 6 years of age.
Given these main expectations, two other hypotheses had to be tested first:

(1) There are differences in performances on between backward word span,

measuring working memory, and in forward word span, measuring short-term
memory, since the backward memory task is more complex than the forward
memory task (Alloway et al., 2006).
(2) Verbal abilities are related to listening comprehension in preschoolers, just as they
are in school-age children (Oakhill et al., 2003; Ouellette, 2006; Stothard & Hulme,
1996). Since the study of the relations between verbal abilities and listening
comprehension in preschool children is necessary in order to determine the role
of memory, verbal abilities have the sole function of control variables.

Method
Participants
Eighty-four children participated in this study. Forty-four were 4-year-old children (from 4
to 4 years 11 months of age, mean age ¼ 4 years and 6 months, SD ¼ 4 months)
and forty were 5-year-old children (from 5 to 5 years and 11 months of age, mean
age ¼ 5 years and 4 months, SD ¼ 5 months). In each age group, half the participants
were males and half were females. Parental consent was obtained for each child.
The children attended kindergartens located throughout Italy and came from
families living in mid-low socio-economic catchment areas. All the children spoke Italian
as their first language. According to their teachers’ reports, none of these children had
cognitive impairments or language difficulties.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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940 E. Florit et al.

Materials and procedure

The present study is part of a cross-sectional project in which listening comprehension
and various cognitive and linguistic component skills were evaluated using standardized
and experimental measures. Tasks were individually administered; each child was tested
in a quiet area of the school over four sessions lasting approximately 30 min each. The
tasks presented in each session were set in advance but the order of presentation was
randomized. Skills evaluated in the first session were listening comprehension (first
story of the listening comprehension test), short-term memory and sentence
comprehension; the second session tested verbal ability (Similarities subtest from the
Wechsler intelligence scale for preschool and primary school), listening comprehension
(second story of the listening comprehension test) and receptive vocabulary; the third
session tested inference generation, working memory and verbal ability (vocabulary
subtest from the Wechsler intelligence scale for preschool and primary school); the
fourth session tested the inhibition of irrelevant information, the use of context and non-
verbal ability. The present study was concerned with three abilities: listening
comprehension of short stories, which was the focus of the investigation, verbal ability,
which acted as a control variable, and short-term and working memory.
The tasks used to evaluate the skills relevant for the present study are described below.

Listening comprehension
Test for listening comprehension – TOR 3–8 (Levorato & Roch, 2007; hereafter TOR 3–8),
designed for children between 3 and 8 years of age, was used. The test for the age
considered consists of two short stories of equal difficulty and length, which are read
individually to each participant. Comprehension was evaluated using 10 questions per
story, half of which were based on explicit information (factual questions) while the
others required inferences to be generated (inferential questions). The questions were
followed by a multiple-choice task: After having listened to the questions, the children
were asked to respond by choosing the correct answer out of four possibilities. The
answers were read by the experimenter who also pointed to the corresponding picture: A
set of four pictures was created for each question. In order to avoid overburdening
memory resources and in order to guarantee the children remained attentive, the tester
interrupted the reading at two pre-established points in order to ask questions either
explicitly or implicitly related to the preceding part of the story. Each correct answer was
given one point (range 0–10) with raw scores converted into scaled scores ranging from
5 to 15 (M ¼ 10, SD ¼ 2). The reliability for TOR 3–8, evaluated by calculating Cronbach’s
alpha over items of the stories, ranges from .52 to .72, which is not low considering that
two types of questions (factual and inferential) were used to assess comprehension.

Verbal ability
In order to assess children’s verbal ability we selected the same tests used in the study of
Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004):

(1) Two subtests from the verbal scale of the Wechsler intelligence scale for preschool
and primary school (Wechsler, 1967 – Italian adaptation by Bogani & Corchia,
1973): Vocabulary and similarities. The vocabulary subtest required children to
define words of increasing semantic complexity and decreasing frequency. The
similarities subtest required children to identify the common quality and property
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 941

in each of 16 pairs of lexical items. For both tests, raw scores can be converted into
scaled scores ranging from 1 to 19 (M ¼ 10, SD ¼ 3). A composite score (hereafter
verbal IQ, VIQ) was estimated by computing mean scaled scores for vocabulary
and similarities subtests (cf. Cain & Oakhill, 2006). The reliability for the
vocabulary and similarities subtests, evaluated using the split-half procedure, was
.87 and .80 respectively.
(2) Peabody picture vocabulary test-revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981, standardised for Italian
speakers by Stella, Pizzoli, & Tressoldi, 2000; hereafter PPVT-R), which evaluates
receptive vocabulary. The test was standardised on children between the ages of 3 and
12 inclusive. Children were required to choose which picture out of a set of four
represented words of increasing complexity and decreasing frequency spoken by the
experimenter. The test stopped when children gave six incorrect answers on eight
consecutive items. The sum of correct answers was the total raw score. Raw scores
can be converted into standard scores (M ¼ 100, SD ¼ 15). The reliability for the
PPVT-R, which was evaluated using the split-half procedure, was .88.

Memory skills
Two tasks were used: a forward word span task to evaluate short-term memory skills,
and a backward word span task to evaluate working memory skills. Each task consisted
of 20 series of list of words (from 2 to 6 words). Four series of words were presented for
each list length. The words were bi-syllabic concrete nouns taken from different
semantic domains and having the same frequency of use in a child’s vocabulary
(Marconi, Ott, Pesenti, Ratti, & Tarella, 1994). They were the same for the two tasks,
which were administered at a one-to-two-week distance from each other to control for
memory effects. In the forward word span, children were required to repeat the list of
words in the same order as they were presented by the experimenter (storage of
information was required), whereas in the backward word span children had to repeat
the word lists in reverse order (simultaneous storage and processing of information was
required). Testing ceased when the child was unable to repeat three out of four series of
the same length. One point was credited for each series correctly repeated. Two
measures were computed for each participant: (a) the number of the series correctly
repeated (possible range 0–20), and (b) the memory span, i.e. the maximum length
at which the child was able to correctly repeat three series of words out of four (possible
range from 1 – when children were not able to repeated three series at word length
two – to 6).
Practice trials preceded the experimental trials to ensure comprehension of the
tasks. The reliability of the forward and backward word span tasks was assessed by
calculating Cronbach’s alpha over items. The reliability coefficient was acceptable for
forward word span (.58) and good for backward word span (.70).

Results
Descriptive statistics
All the children completed the tasks. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for the two
age groups.
TOR 3–8. The performance of children aged both 4 to 4 years and 11 months and 5 to
5 years 11 months was appropriate for age.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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942 E. Florit et al.

Table 1. Means and standard deviations for every task in each age group

4-year-olds (n ¼ 44) 5-year-olds (n ¼ 40)

M SD Range M SD Range

TOR 3–8a 10.18 1.51 7.0–13.0 11.33 2.07 7.0–14.0

VIQb 8.88 2.60 2.5–14.5 9.81 2.16 4.5–14.0
PPVT-Rc 78.66 12.40 65.0–113.0 82.65 11.50 65.0–107.0
Forward spand 7.41 1.26 4.0–11.0 7.80 1.45 5.0–13
Backward spand 4.20 1.90 0–7.0 4.90 1.43 3.0–8.0

Note. TOR 3–8, Test for listening comprehension; VIQ, verbal IQ; PPVT-R, Peabody picture vocabulary
test-revised.
a
Scaled scores: M ¼ 10; SD ¼ 2.
b
Scaled scores: M ¼ 10; SD ¼ 3.
c
Standard scores: M ¼ 100; SD ¼ 15.
d
Number of series correctly repeated (possible range 0–20).

VIQ. Both groups of children performed at a level appropriate for their age. Six
children in the group of 4-year-olds and two children in the group of 5-year-olds
performed more than 1.5 standard deviations below the mean.
PPVT-R. Children in both groups performed at a lower level than the normative
population of their age. Based on the normative data, six children in the group of 4-year-
olds and two in the group of 5-year-olds obtained scores more than 2.5 standard
deviations below the mean. These values were replaced with values corresponding to
2 2.5 standard deviations in order to carry out the statistical analyses1.
Forward and backward word span. The average forward memory span was 2.98
and 3.08 whereas the average backward word span was 2.09 and 2.28 for the group of
4- and 5-year-olds, respectively.
In Table 1 the number of series correctly repeated is reported. This measure was
used in the following analyses since it is a more sensitive measure of the performance
level reached by each child than memory span. Neither task suffered from floor effects,
but for the backward task the scores were low overall and there was a restricted
variability, presumably because the task was very demanding for the young children in
this study and the scoring procedure used was very strict. Nonetheless, in both
tasks the performance of the two groups seems to be in line with the findings of
other authors (i.e. Adams et al., 1999, 2004; Alloway et al., 2006; Gathercole &
Adams, 1994).

Comparison between short-term and working memory performances

Based on the findings of Alloway et al. (2006), we compared performances in forward
and backward word span tests to analyse differences in the processing load between
the two memory tasks. Paired t-tests on the correctly repeated series in forward and
backward word span were computed for each age group. In both cases children
performed better in the short-term memory task than in the working memory task

1
A parallel set of the analyses was carried out excluding these eight children; no substantial differences emerged, therefore the
following analyses were based on all 84 children of the original group.
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 943

(t (43) ¼ 9.29, p , .001, d ¼ 1.40 and t (39) ¼ 9.99, p , .001, d ¼ 1.58 for the
groups of 4-year-olds and of 5-year-olds respectively). This result confirmed that
the backward word span requires more processing resources and measures a more
complex ability than forward word span (Alloway et al., 2006).

Interrelations between tasks

Table 2 shows the correlations between listening comprehension, on one hand, and
verbal abilities and memory skills, on the other hand, for the two age groups.
Table 2. Correlations between the tasks in the two age groups

VIQ PPVT-R Forward span Backward span

4-year-olds (n ¼ 44)
TOR 3–8 .40* .45* .37 .37
VIQ .61* .19 .05
PPVT-R .19 2 .02
Forward span 2 .01
5-year-olds (n ¼ 40)
TOR 3–8 .50* .40* .38 .38
VIQ .26 .05 .28
PPVT-R .27 .21
Forward span .19

Note. TOR 3–8, test for listening comprehension; VIQ, verbal IQ; PPVT-R, Peabody picture vocabulary
test-revised.
*
A significance level of .005 was adopted (Bonferroni correction: .05/10 ¼ .005).

In each group significant correlations were found between listening comprehension,

on one hand, and verbal abilities, both receptive vocabulary (PPVT-R) and the ability to
operate with verbal information (VIQ), on the other hand. A correlation also emerged
between receptive vocabulary and verbal IQ in the group of 4-year-olds, whereas these
skills were not significantly related in the group of 5-year-olds.
With regards to memory skills, no statistically significant correlation was found
either with listening comprehension or with verbal abilities: This finding concerns both
short-term memory and working memory. However, it should be pointed out that these
correlations (r ¼ .37 for correlations between both memory skills and listening
comprehension in the group of 4-year-olds and r ¼ .38 for correlations between both
memory skills and listening comprehension in the group of 5-year-olds), correspond to
medium effect sizes (Cohen, 1988) and are not trivial. In neither age group did a
significant correlation between short-term and working memory emerge.
In sum, based on these results, listening comprehension seems to be related to verbal
abilities, whereas relations with memory skills are lower but not negligible. It is worth
noting that a very conservative correction was adopted for the correlation analyses; a
more lenient criterion would result in significant correlations between backward and
forward word span, on one hand, and listening comprehension, on the other hand. This
consideration might be born in mind when interpreting the results of the subsequent
analysis.
The next analysis is aimed at evaluating the specific contribution that these abilities
make to listening comprehension in 4- and 5-year-old children.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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944 E. Florit et al.

The role of verbal abilities and memory skills in listening comprehension

To analyse the role of verbal abilities and memory skills in listening comprehension
between 4 and 6 years, we conducted a fixed-order hierarchical multiple regression
analysis with TOR 3–8 as the dependent variable. The order of predictors was selected
a priori to test our hypothesis. Predictors entered were age (0 ¼ 4-year-olds and
1 ¼ 5-year-olds) in the first step, verbal abilities (VIQ and PPVT-R) in the second step,
short-term memory (forward word span) in the third step, working memory (backward
word span) in the fourth step and the interactions between short-term and working
memory, on one hand, and age, on the other hand, in the last step.
Age was entered to test for its effect on listening comprehension and to test for its
interactions with memory skills. A significant age effect on listening comprehension
would indicate a qualitative and quantitative development between 4 and 6 years of age
and a significant interaction with memory skills would mean that age operates as a
moderator in the relation between memory skills and listening comprehension2. In the
second step, we entered verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary to test for their effects on
and control for their relation with listening comprehension. These variables were
treated as control variables in determining the relation between memory and listening
comprehension in order to verify whether memory skills predict listening
comprehension after controlling for verbal abilities. So, short-term and working
memory skills were added to the model in order to evaluate if they explained additional
variance over and above verbal ability. Short-term and working memory skills were
entered in separate steps in order to evaluate the specific contribution of each and to
evaluate if the additional processing requirement of working memory explains
additional variance with respect to storage, which is involved in both tasks.
Interactions between the two memory skills on one hand and age on the other hand were
not significant ( p ¼ .977; p ¼ .812 for short-term and working memory respectively). This
result shows that the nature of the relation between memory and listening comprehension
ability is not moderated by the effect of age, and it is stable between 4 and 6 years of age.
Consequently, we tested a more parsimonious model in which these interactions
were excluded. This model is presented in Table 3.
The model accounted for a substantial amount of variance (54%) in listening
comprehension. Age explained 22% of variability in listening comprehension. Verbal IQ
and receptive vocabulary accounted for an additional 22% of variance. Short-term
memory contributed to a significant 4% of variance in listening comprehension and also
working memory, entered in the last step, added an additional 6% of variance.
These results show that performance in listening comprehension increased between
4 and 6 years. VIQ and receptive Vocabulary were significant predictors of listening
comprehension in preschool children and played a crucial role in the process of
listening comprehension even after taking into account the contribution of age. As far as
the memory variables were concerned, both short-term and working memory were
significant predictors of listening comprehension over and above verbal abilities.
Working memory explained additional variance in listening comprehension after
controlling for short-term memory, showing that the ability to process the information
in memory accounts for listening comprehension over the contribution of storage-only
capabilities.

2
The interactions between receptive vocabulary and verbal IQ, on one hand, and age, on the other hand, were not tested
because these two variables were treated as control variables.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 945

Table 3. Fixed-order hierarchical multiple regression analysis with listening comprehension as the
dependent variable and short-term memory and working memory as predictors, controlling for age,
verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary

R2 DR2 B SE B b

Step 1
.22 .22*
Age 3.88 0.81 .47**
Step 2
.44 .22*
Age 3.06 0.71 .37**
VIQ 0.41 0.17 .24**
PPVT-R 0.11 0.03 .31**
Step 3
.48 .04*
Age 2.88 0.69 .35**
VIQ 0.40 0.16 .24**
PPVT-R 0.09 0.03 .27**
Forward span 0.65 0.26 .21**
Step 4
.54 .06*
Age 2.53 0.67 .31**
VIQ 0.35 0.15 .20**
PPVT-R 0.09 0.03 .27**
Forward span 0.60 0.25 .20**
Backward span 0.59 0.19 .25**

Note. VIQ, verbal IQ; PPVT-R, Peabody picture vocabulary test-revised.

*
ps , .05; **ps , .05.

In sum, based on these results, both age and verbal abilities contribute to a large
extent to listening comprehension and memory skills make a specific contribution, even
if it is not a large one, to listening comprehension in preschool children.

Discussion
In this study, we adopted an approach similar to that of Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004),
who demonstrated that the contribution of working memory to text comprehension is
specific and not wholly mediated by verbal skills. We also analysed the role played by
short-term memory with respect to listening comprehension and extended the
investigation to preschool children aged between 4 and 6 years. A link between memory
skills and text comprehension was also expected on the basis of studies on reading
comprehension in school-age children that had found relations between reading
comprehension and working memory (Cain, 2006; Seigneuric et al., 2000) as well as
with short-term memory (Goff et al., 2005; Leather & Henry, 1994).
We found that memory skills, evaluated using verbal tasks, gave a unique and
independent contribution to listening comprehension after controlling for verbal
abilities, explaining 10% of variability in listening comprehension. The role of memory
is stable over the time period we considered. On the whole, these findings suggest
that the model proposed by Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant (2004), which has proven valid
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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946 E. Florit et al.

for school-age children, is valid for preschoolers as well. The method we used is
similar to the one adopted by these authors; in particular, we considered a group of
unselected children and used hierarchical multiple regression analysis to investigate if
memory skills contribute to listening comprehension over and above verbal skills. Our
results differ from those obtained by Nation et al. (1999), who adopted a different
method; they compared groups of good and poor comprehenders in verbal and spatial
complex span tasks and concluded that memory difficulties associated with poor
reading comprehension were specific to verbal domain and were mediated by verbal
abilities.
The differences between our study and Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant’s (2004) on one
hand and Nation et al.’s (1999) on the other hand deserve discussion. If we consider the
relationship between memory and verbal skills, we observe that no significant
correlations were found in the current study. An explanation of this result might be
found in the type of memory tasks we used, which had a low semantic load, involving
only concrete words which were supposed to be familiar for the majority of the
children. Therefore, the absence of a significant correlation between verbal skills and
memory could be due to the fact that the role of verbal knowledge was reduced in the
memory tasks. This hypothesis is in line with the findings of Cain (2006), who did not
report any strong relation between short-term memory and verbal skills when
vocabulary differences between groups of good and poor comprehenders were
controlled.
Our results seem to support the conclusion that a direct relation exists between
memory and listening comprehension. Future investigations should clarify the
conditions under which the ability to store and manipulate verbal material is related
to listening comprehension in preschoolers and in particular whether (a) only verbal
memory is related to listening comprehension, as shown by Nation et al. (1999), who
excluded a role of visuospatial memory, and (b) the role of verbal memory depends on
the type of verbal material used in memory tasks. It could be argued that partially
different results might be obtained according to whether abstract words, as in Nation
et al. (1999), or low-frequency words were used.
Additional information on the relationship between verbal memory and listening
comprehension might be obtained by taking into consideration the type of errors made
by preschool children in performing memory tasks. A qualitative observation of our
protocols showed that children tended to substitute some words with semantically
related words: this suggests that verbal knowledge might intervene in performing
memory tasks and that we should exercise some caution when we exclude the
possibility that the contribution of memory to listening comprehension could be
affected by verbal knowledge. Indeed, studies that analyzed the short-term recall of
sentences in preschoolers found an influence of semantic memory showing that
children were more likely to substitute target words in the sentence to be recalled with
synonyms rather than unrelated words (Alloway & Gathercole, 2005; Potter &
Lombardi, 1990).
Another contribution of the current study concerns the analysis of the specific
role played by short-term and working memory respectively. Short-term memory
played a role in explaining individual differences in listening comprehension, and
working memory specifically contributed to listening comprehension over and above
short-term memory. Overall, the two functions of memory contribute to listening
comprehension to a similar extent, with working memory accounting for slightly
more variance.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 947

Short-term memory explained 4% of variance in listening comprehension after

controlling for verbal skills, showing that the function of storage plays a role in the
process of listening comprehension; this result was expected since in preschoolers the
simple function of storage and maintenance of information also has to have developed to
allow comprehension of complex linguistic information such as texts. This is
particularly true considering the nature of a listening comprehension task where the
information is available for a short time and therefore might involve greater storage
demands than reading comprehension, where the text is at disposal of the reader for all
the time needed to carry out processing.
Working memory accounts for a 6% of variance in listening comprehension over
and above short-term memory: This means that not only the maintenance but also
the processing of information in memory provides a unique and independent
contribution to listening comprehension. This result was expected given that a major
component of text comprehension is the ability to actively manipulate text
information in memory; indeed, the construction of a coherent and meaningful text
representation is based on the ability to integrate newly encountered information
with that which has been previously acquired and with world knowledge. This
finding confirms evidence from elementary school children showing that complex
span tasks, which require the simultaneous storage and processing of information in
memory, explained additional variance with respect to simple span tasks (Leather &
Henry, 1994).
As far as the relations between short-term and working memory are concerned, we
found that forward and backward word span did not share a large amount of variance.
Previous studies involving school-age (e.g. Leather & Henry, 1994) and preschool
children (e.g. Adams et al., 1999) also found weak correlations between complex and
simple span tasks, although not so weak as those found in the current study. This result
was explained considering the different abilities involved in the two tasks as found in
recent studies that analyzed the structure of memory in preschool-age with reference to
Baddeley’s (1986) model (Alloway et al., 2006). Alloway et al. (2006) used, among other
tasks, simple span measures which are purported to tap into verbal short-term memory
(storage component), and complex span measures, which tap into more executive
resources (processing component) in children between 4 and 6 years of age. These
authors found evidence that verbal short-term memory span tasks tap into a single factor
that corresponds to a storage-only component for verbal material, whereas complex
span tasks also involved a second factor that corresponds to a processing component or
central executive. This result suggests that the abilities underlying the two memory
tasks are partially independent.
Verbal skills have been considered in the current study as control variables: Both
receptive and expressive abilities that involve lexical and semantic knowledge have
been taken into consideration: They have proven to be powerful predictors of listening
comprehension, explaining 22% of variance in listening comprehension. This finding is
consistent with results obtained in work on school-age children in which verbal ability
and vocabulary knowledge were related to reading comprehension (Oakhill et al., 2003;
Ouellette, 2006; Stothard & Hulme, 1996).
Memory skills have been shown to have the same effect on listening comprehension
at 4–5 as at 5–6 years of age. On the contrary, the ability to understand oral texts
develops in this age range. In fact, age turned out to be a crucial variable affecting
children’s performance. This suggests that in a short period of time a significant
evolution occurs in an ability, which is still in an early phase of its acquisition.
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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948 E. Florit et al.

The present study extends our knowledge about text comprehension and the
role played by memory in several important ways. However, the study also has some
limitations that need to be acknowledged. A first limitation is that we had only a
single measure of both short-term and working memory. The inclusion of multiple
indicators of memory might allow a more reliable assessment of this component.
A second aspect that deserves discussion, is the amount of variance explained by the
variables considered in our study. Verbal abilities and memory skills accounted for 32%
of variability in listening comprehension. Although this amount of variance
is comparable to that explained in other studies analysing the role of the same
variables (e.g. Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Oakhill et al., 2003, see the regression
analysis for 7- to 8-year-old children at Time 1) and of vocabulary knowledge and
memory skills (Seigneuric & Ehrlich, 2005; Seigneuric et al., 2000), it does not
completely account for individual differences in listening comprehension ability.
Indeed, other factors that were not considered in our study may play a role in text
comprehension as well. In particular, we refer to higher level abilities such as inference
making skills (Bowyer-Crane & Snowling, 2005), knowledge of story structure
(Cain, 2003) and comprehension monitoring (Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005).
In conclusion, results obtained in this study with children aged 4–6 years are similar
in various aspects to findings previously obtained with school-age children:

(1) Memory skills contribute to individual differences in text comprehension (Cain,

2006; Leather & Henry, 1994; Seigneuric et al., 2000).
(2) Working memory explains additional variance in text comprehension over and
above verbal abilities (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004).
(3) Working memory accounts for additional variance in text comprehension over and
above short-term memory (Leather & Henry, 1994).
(4) Verbal skills were powerful predictors of text comprehension (Oakhill et al., 2003;
Ouellette, 2006; Stothard & Hulme, 1996).

Based on these finding it can be concluded that: (a) similar phenomena underlie text
comprehension in preschoolers and in school-age children, and (b) listening
comprehension is based on the same components that have been shown to underpin
reading comprehension.
These conclusions suggest that the study of the acquisition and development of
listening comprehension during the preschool years has theoretical and educational
implications. It is important to follow the development of text comprehension starting
from the first phases of its acquisition in order to identify the components of the
process and to evaluate their role at different points of development. This investigation
could also shed light on the causes of individual differences in reading comprehension,
considering that performance in listening comprehension in preschoolers might affect
reading comprehension as well. As pointed out by some models such as the ‘simple
view’ of reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990), listening comprehension figures as a
component of reading comprehension. Moreover, listening and reading comprehen-
sion depend on the same general comprehension processes, although reading
comprehension also requires the ability to decode written words. It is important to
analyse the mechanisms underlying text comprehension ability before the literacy
process begins because listening comprehension skills, acquired by children during
preschool years, facilitate the acquisition of later written language comprehension
ability (Kendeou et al., 2007).
 2044835x, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X397189 by Universitatea Technica, Wiley Online Library on [05/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
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Listening comprehension in preschoolers 949

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their useful
suggestions. This study was financed by a grant No. PRIN 2005119758_005.

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Received 5 June 2008; revised version received 11 November 2008