The relationship between short-term memory and language acquisition and development in Down syndrome

Some neuropsychological studies of brain damaged patients and studies of typical young children lead to the conclusion that the phonological short-term memory abilities directly influence the way new vocabulary items are acquired. As Down’s syndrome people generally show an impairment of phonological short-term memory and a lack in lexical knowledge, we decided to study the relationship between both variables in this population. Our results indicate that in Down's syndrome subjects, as well as in typically developing children lexical knowledge seems to be linked to the phonological short-term memory abilities and more specially to nonword repetition.