Background:
Developmental language disorder (DLD) is an impairment that disturbs the ability to acquire and make use of native language. The exact cognitive and neuronal brain underpinnings of the disorder are still a matter of investigation.

Material and methods:
The relationship between the audiovisual phonemic short-term memory and particular language abilities was examined among 7–9 year-old children with DLD as well as in a gender, age, and IQ-matched control group. Children were assessed with a standard language battery and the Stanford–Binet scale (SB5). Subsequently, they performed a short-term memory task requiring immediate recall of sequences composed of syllables presented audiovisually.

Results:
There were lower levels of audiovisual phonemic memory among children with DLD. They performed significantly worse than matched typically developing (TD) children in the experimental task and their performance was correlated with scores obtained in each language subtest. In contrast, we did not find between-group differences in visual short-term operational memory measured on the SB5 scale.

Conclusions:
The present experiment replicated previous findings about short-term phonemic memory impairment in the DLD population. We found that memory impairment also occurs even if phoneme information is presented simultaneously in the auditory and visual domains. It appears that non-linguistic spatial cues accompanying phoneme stimuli do not overcome phonemic short-term memory impairment.