Abstract

After reviewed literature about verbal working memory, a new test for assessing memory for the story in preschoolers was developed. This test consists of a story that the subjects have to repeat immediately later they have listened to it. The story was administered to 106 children, ranged from 4-to-6 years old. The results showed significant indexes of reliability and validity for semantic units of the story. Reliability and validity of the syntactic units of the story were not significant. In study 2 a new version of the story was administered to a new sample of 106 children. The results found a significant improvement for reliability and validity of the story. It was also showed that the general score of the story was correlated significantly with the scoring of the two best scoring models in literature (grammar of the story and analysis of the story). Finally the general score permitted to create two different groups of preschoolers: high score and low score. Subjects who scored higher on the general score reported also high score on a test of attention.