The only measure that was not significantly affected by vWM was the % of Complete Sentences on the Nest Story description task (p < .010) (see Table 3). This might be explained in two ways: one possibility is that the vWM difficulties of the participants with SLI affected their ability to correctly process the grammatical information required to complete and understand sentences in traditional tasks as well as their ability to produce morphologically sound words on a narrative description task, but not their ability to produce well-formed sentences on the same narrative production task; a second possibility is that this apparently awkward result might depend on a different factor, such as the potential interconnections between micro- and macrolinguistic aspects of linguistic processing. As the first possibility seems unlikely, we explored the potential relationship between the % of Complete Sentences and the macrolinguistic measures that might have affected the production of complete sentences in the narrative task (i.e., % of Global Coherence Errors and % of Lexical Informativeness) by using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. Interestingly, these correlations were
highly significant (% Global Coherence Errors: r = .402; p < 025; % of Lexical Informativeness: r = .571; p < 001).