Phonological short-term memory and individual differences in learning to speak: a bilingual case study

The language development of two bilingual siblings, who learned to speak at greatly different rates, is briefly described. The child with the delayed onset of speech had difficulty with articulation, syntax, function words and inflections, particularly when speaking in German. Now, as a young teenager, he has no overt speech problem in English, his preferred language, and he does well in school and on standardized achievement tests of language arts and mathematics. Nevertheless, on a storytelling task at age 12;6, he used significantly shorter, less complex sentences than his sister did at the same age. In German, his 'mother tongue' yet less preferred language, he still has major grammatical difficulties. Recent memory tests showed that his early difficulty with immediate verbal repetition is still present. His difficulty is most pronounced on a verbal short-term memory task requiring repetition of unrelated words, whereas on a task where the verbal input can be reproduced nonverbally, his short-term memory is excellent.