Research On Rehearsal Strategy Intervention For Short-term Memory Of Children With Down Syndrome

Large amounts of studies have been conducted on memory system of children with Down syndrome in foreign countries. Evidences showed that children with Down syndrome suffer from deficit in their short-term memory, which actually leads to their even worse performance in the memory tasks compared with children with other type of learning difficulties. Hearing difficulties, speech production problems and impoverished linguistic knowledge were proved to have negative effects on DS children's performance in memory tasks, but these factors are not the fundamental cause for their memory impairment. The "working memory" model has accounted for this fundamental impairment within the "phonological loop". Current studies focus on rehearsal process, which can offset the time-based decay of information in the phonological loop. Cumulative rehearsal strategy training is now widely used in foreign countries, which was proved to have achieved significant immediate and long-term effects. However in China, there are not any studies in relative areas by far. The paper aimed at exploring the level of short-term memory of children with Down syndrome in China, adopting cumulative rehearsal strategy training on DS children and evaluating the effects of this rehearsal intervention.This study came to several conclusions: the average short-term memory span was 2-3 and individuals have demonstrated significant developmental differences among digit, word and picture spans, with the best performance on digit spans. Children of eleven to fifteen age group demonstrated best among three age groups and there were no significant difference between different genders. The rehearsal strategy training has achieved significant immediate effects, it also has gained good maintenance during the re-test conducted one month after the training session. Although children did not demonstrate as well as in the immediate memory test, performance was still significantly higher than that before the training. This study has achieved both significant immediate training effect and good maintenance of the training.