Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
 
 

Recall response durations were used to clarify processing in working-memory tasks.
Experiment 1 examined children's performance in reading span, a task in which sentences
were processed while the final word of each sentence was retained for subsequent recall.
Experiment 2 examined the development of listening-, counting-, and digit-span task
performance. Responses were much longer in the reading- and listening-span tasks than in
the other span tasks, suggesting that participants in sentence-based span tasks take time to
retrieve the semantic or linguistic structure as cues to recall of the sentence-final words.
Response durations in working-memory tasks helped to predict academic skills and achievement,
largely separate from the contributions of the memory spans themselves. Response durations
thus are important in the interpretation of span task performance.