The role of subvocal rehearsal in preschool children’s prospective memory

Mahy, Caitlin E. V.; Mohun, Hannah; Müller, Ulrich; Moses, Louis J. · 2016 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.07.001

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Summary

This study investigates the role of subvocal rehearsal in preschool children’s prospective memory (PM), specifically examining how disrupting this process during the delay interval between intention formation and task execution affects performance. While age-related improvements in PM are well-documented, the cognitive mechanisms supporting intention maintenance during the delay period remain underexplored. Drawing on Baddeley’s working memory model and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech, the authors hypothesized that children use subvocal rehearsal to refresh prospective intentions. They predicted that disrupting this rehearsal would impair PM, particularly for younger children, and that individual differences in verbal ability would moderate this effect. The researchers tested 64 preschoolers (32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds) using a card-sorting PM task. Participants were randomly assigned to either a standard condition, where they drew pictures quietly during a three-minute delay, or a verbal interference condition, where they answered questions aloud every 20 seconds to disrupt subvocal rehearsal. Following the PM task, children completed measures of verbal working memory (backward word span), inhibitory control (Grass/Snow and Head-Shoulders-Knees-Toes tasks), and receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). The design allowed for the assessment of main effects of age and condition, as well as correlations between PM performance and executive/verbal abilities under different interference levels. Results indicated that five-year-olds outperformed four-year-olds in PM, and children in the standard condition performed better than those in the verbal interference condition. A marginal interaction revealed that four-year-olds’ PM performance significantly declined under verbal interference, whereas five-year-olds’ performance remained stable. Crucially, PM performance correlated positively with verbal working memory and receptive vocabulary only in the verbal interference condition, not in the standard condition. Inhibitory control did not correlate with PM in either condition. Regression analyses further confirmed that receptive vocabulary, rather than general cognitive load or working memory capacity, predicted PM success under verbal interference, suggesting the manipulation specifically targeted verbal processing mechanisms. The findings demonstrate that subvocal rehearsal plays a critical role in maintaining prospective intentions during delay periods, particularly for four-year-olds whose emerging verbal self-regulation is more susceptible to disruption. The results support the view that children rely on the phonological loop to refresh intentions, with stronger verbal abilities providing a protective advantage against interference. This study highlights the importance of verbal processes in early childhood PM development and suggests that older children may utilize more efficient or alternative strategies to maintain intentions, reducing their reliance on subvocal rehearsal.

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• prospective memory interruptions