Preschoolers type of temperament as predictor of potential difficulties in cognitive functioning

Based on teacher evaluation and parental questionnaires, 72 kindergarten children, 40 boys and 32 girls, of easy, difficult and slow-to-warm-up types of temperament were identified and their performance on several different measures of vocabulary, memory and reasoning was compared. Whereas no differences were found among the groups on the vocabulary measures and no consistent findings were observed for the reasoning tests, the difficult children were found to score significantly below the others on both measures of immediate sequential memory administered, i.e., the Sentences from the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence and the Auditory Sequential Memory from the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. In a multiple regression, with each of the congitive measures as criteria and the temperament variables as predictors, distractibility and intensity of response were isolated as most predictive of children's performance on the two measures of immediate memory.