Contributions of children's linguistic and working memory proficiencies to their judgments of grammaticality.

Purpose: The authors explored the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing by systematically examining the performance of children with deficits in the domains of working memory and language.

Method: From a database of 370 school-age children who had completed a grammaticality judgment task, groups were identified with a co-occurring language and working memory impairment (LI-WMI; n = 18) or specific language impairment (SLI) with typical working memory skills ( n = 60) and matched control groups. Correct and incorrect use of grammatical markers occurred either early or late in sentence stimuli, imposing a greater working memory load for late-marker sentences.