The Talking Cure

If friends criticize you for talking too fast, at least they can't also accuse you of having a bad memory. Speech rate is a strong index of short-term memory span. The recent discovery that the two are linked in kids may be a special boon to those with speech disorders.

"Imagine that your short-term memory is a circular tape loop with 1.6 seconds of memory. Whatever you manage to repeat in that space is what you immediately rx-call. Therefore, the faster you can talk, the greater your short-term memory," says Adrian Raine, Ph.D., a University of Southern California psychologist. The link has been established in adults for some time, Raine reports in Child Development. Now, he and his colleagues find the correlation holds for kids as well, a finding that promises short-term payoff in the classroom and long-term payoff in life.

Short-term memory is the power behind recall of phone numbers, directions, and other everyday tasks. It is also the foundation of arithmetic and reading skills

Raine and his colleagues first looked at 37 children with normal speech and 37 who, because of a speech disorder, spoke about half as fast. Then they tested their short-term memory spans.

"The speech-disordered children all had severe impairment of short-term memory that was not attributable to any general intellectual deficit," Raine reports. Yet short-term memory is extremely important in childhood, more so than in adulthood, because that's when you're doing the most memorizing.

That raises the possibility that speech-training may be a short cut to achievement. Says Raine: "If you can teach kids with speech disorders to speak faster, that should have wide-ranging benefits for other aspects of cognitive development and for their mastery of academic skills." Who says talk is cheap.

Illustration: (PAUL CORIO)