In this study we examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-timesentence comprehension/processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Atotal of 12 children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age(CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax (RS) completed three tasks. In the workingmemory task, children recalled as many words as possible under three processing load conditionsvarying in the number of mental operations (i.e., no load, single load, dual load). In the off-linecomprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant and redundant sentences. Inthe real-time sentence processing task, children monitored sentences for the occurrence of atarget word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of a test sentence and pushed a responsepad as quickly as possible upon hearing the target. In the memory task, SLI children recalledfewer words in the dual-load condition relative to CA peers, who showed no condition effect.The SLI and RS groups performed similarly overall; however, both groups recalled fewer wordsin the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. In the off-line task, the SLI groupcomprehended fewer sentences of both types relative to the CA controls and fewer redundantsentences relative to themselves and to the RS controls. A significant correlation betweenworking memory and sentence comprehension was found for the SLI group and control groups.For the on-line task, between-group analyses revealed that the SLI group yielded an overallslower word recognition reaction time than the CA and RS groups. Working memory andsentence processing were not correlated for any group. Results were interpreted to suggest thatSLI children have a more limited functional working memory capacity than their CA peers.Children with SLI also appear to have greater difficulty managing their working memoryresources relative to both age peers and younger children when performing a conventionaloff-line sentence comprehension task but not a real-time sentence processing task.