The impact of syntactic knowledge on working memory for serial order

While a vast number of studies have shown that the retention of item information in verbal working memory (WM) is strongly determined by long-term language knowledge, the interaction between the retention of serial order information in WM and verbal long-term is much more controversial. This study explored the impact of syntactic long-term knowledge on serial order retention abilities in WM.

We presented to French speaking participants sequences of adjective – noun pairs, with adjectives either preceding or following the noun. The French language is of particular interest here as depending on the type of adjective, the most frequent positional occurrence of an adjective is either before or after the noun. We constructed adjective-noun pair lists that either obeyed to these statistical syntactic rules or that violated these rules. We hypothesized that if serial order recall in WM depends on long-term knowledge, then serial order recall errors should be larger for WM lists including adjective-noun pairs with infrequent/illegal positional arrangement, and serial order migration errors should occur involving positional regularization of the infrequent/illegal adjective-noun pairing. This hypothesis was tested in 120 participants (18-35 years old) who had to memorize and repeat 6-word lists containing each 3 adjective-noun pairs, the pairings following the syntactically most frequent order or not. Data analysis is on-going.