Echoes of the Early Years: Investigating Auditory Working Memory Development in the First Years of Life

The present study investigates the relationship between auditory working memory and language in 21 Turkish infants aged from 6 to 25 months. The participants (N=21) were assessed through two instruments, namely the ADAM experiment -used to evaluate the phonological working memory capacity of the infants- and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory -employed to evaluate the language development-. All assessment process was conducted online. The ADAM experiment was conducted twice. The second test was fifteen days apart from the first. The results showed that the mean value for phonological memory span was calculated to be 2, indicating a two-item memory capacity. Moreover, no statistically significant evidence was found to support that language comprehension has a relationship with working memory scores after controlling for age. On the other hand, analyses regarding the link between language production and phonological working memory capacity indicated that there is a modest significant relation between the two constructs. Because of the preliminary nature of the study and the limited sample size, future studies are needed to expand the results of this research.