In individuals with Down syndrome (DS) deficits in verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and deficits in sentence comprehension co-occur, suggesting that deficits in VSTM might be causal for the deficits in sentence comprehension. The present study aims to explore the presumed relationship between VSTM and sentence comprehension in individuals with DS by specifically targeting the influence of task demands. The authors assessed VSTM skills in 18 German-speaking children/adolescents with DS by a nonword repetition (NWR) test and elicited data from three different tasks on the comprehension of complex sentence structures: two sentence-picture-matching tasks (TROG-D and a passive test) and one picture-pointing task on object wh-questions. Whereas performance in NWR yielded a significant degree of prediction for scores obtained in the TROG-D and in passive comprehension, no significant degree of prediction was found for NWR and object wh-question comprehension. Moreover, implicational scaling analyses indicated that mental-age adequate performance in sentence comprehension did not imply adequate performance in NWR. Research is needed that specifies the relation between memory systems and sentence comprehension while considering the influence of task demands.

中文翻译：

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德国患有唐氏综合症的儿童和青少年的短期短期记忆和句子理解：当心任务

在患有唐氏综合症（DS）的人中，言语短期记忆（VSTM）缺陷和句子理解力缺陷同时发生，这表明VSTM缺陷可能是句子理解力缺陷的原因。本研究旨在通过专门针对任务需求的影响，探索DS个体中VSTM与句子理解之间的假定关系。作者通过非单词重复（NWR）测试评估了18名德语为DS的德语/儿童的VSTM技能，并从三个不同任务的数据中获得了复杂句子结构的理解：两个句子图片匹配任务（TROG-D和被动测试）和一项针对对象问题的图片指向任务。尽管在NWR中的表现对TROG-D和被动理解中获得的分数有很大程度的预测，但对NWR和对对象的疑问理解没有显着程度的预测。此外，隐含量表分析表明，心理年龄在句子理解中的适当表现并不意味着在NWR中具有适当的表现。需要研究在考虑任务需求的影响的同时指定存储系统与句子理解之间的关系。