Development of Chunk Size and Capacity as a Predictor of Working Memory in Hindi Speaking Typically Developing Children

Enhancement in working memory capacity with increasing age may also be contributed to increase in speed and proficiency of covert verbal rehearsal skill. The major thrust of the present study is to investigate the development of working memory in children by measuring the chunk size and capacity in children. Sixty native Hindi speaking children (twenty each) in the age range of 3-4 years, 5-6 years and 18-20 years participated in this study. Twenty spoken sentences which includes four short, four long, eight short and four pseudo (random) sentences were used in this study. ‘Words recalled for each sentence’ and ‘number of sentence completion’ was measured in this study. Chunk size will be measured by the number of words recalled per sentence while number of sentence completion will estimate chunk capacity. It was observed that performance of group I (3-4yrs) and Group II (4-5yrs) improved with increasing age. There was significant effect of age on words recalled for each sentences type which means children with higher age group performed better than younger age group and poorer than adults. These findings suggest that chunk size of childhood working memory developed as per increasing age. Result also revealed that average sentence completion for short sentence was better across other sentence types. The evidence of the present study fosters that a population specific normative can be developed using a large population sample. Chunk size and capacity are two important predictors of working memory. These predictors may also comment on the potential growth of cognitive and communicative skills of the children.