Journal of experimental child psychology
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J Exp Child Psychol · Oct 2009
Randomized Controlled TrialInvestigating the childhood development of working memory using sentences: new evidence for the growth of chunk capacity.
Child development is accompanied by a robust increase in immediate memory. This may be due to either an increase in the number of items (chunks) that can be maintained in working memory or an increase in the size of those chunks. ⋯ Young children accessed (recalled words from) fewer clauses than did older children or adults, but no age differences were found in the proportion of words recalled from accessed clauses. We argue that the developmental increase in memory span was due to a growing number of chunks present in working memory with little role of chunk size.