The impact of the development of verbal recoding on children's early writing skills.

Background: The spontaneous recoding of visual stimuli into a phonological code to aid short-term retention has been associated with progress in learning to read (Palmer, 2000b).

Aim: This study examined whether there was a comparable association with the development of writing skills.

Sample: One hundred eight children (64 males) in the second year of the UK educational system (mean age 5:8 years, SD = 4 months) were recruited to the study.

Phonological short-term memory contributions to sentence processing in young children.

Two experiments investigated the contribution of phonological short-term memory to the processing of spoken sentences by 4- and 5-year-old children. In Experiment 1, sentences contained either short or longer words, and varied in syntactic structure. Overall, repetition but not comprehension of the sentences was significantly influenced by word length.