PURPOSE: to investigate the influence of the type of linguistic stimulus presentation on phonological memory. METHODS: 27 2nd grade students of a public elementary school with ages ranging between 7 and 8-years old were assessed (59.25% girls). The students had no history or complaints of neurological, cognitive or auditory deficits. The children passed the Auditory Processing Simplified Assessment and were submitted to a syllable or pseudo-word repetition task. The stimuli were recorded and presented as: I) fluent - (pseudo-words presented within a 10-second interval) - presented to 13 students, and II) syllabic - 01-second intervals between syllables and 10-second intervals between each series - presented to 14 students. The repetitions were transcribed; the errors were marked, analyzed and compared according to gender and stimuli presentation pattern. RESULTS: according to the analysis, a one syllable difference was observed, with a better performance when the second list was presented and starting with the 5 syllable stimuli, a higher percentage of correct answers on list 1, when compared to list 2. Gender comparison showed significant differences for the 5 syllables stimuli on the general analysis and on list 2, with better results for boys. CONCLUSION: there was no difference in performance up to the extension of 4 syllables. The presentation of the fluent form facilitated phonological memory performance for both male and female students when the presented stimuli were longer.
Memory; Language; Psycholinguistics
