Long-term memory; Serial order; Syntactic knowledge; Verbal working memory; Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Abstract :
[en] A large body of research demonstrates robust interactions between verbal working memory (WM) and phonological and lexico-semantic language knowledge, particularly for item recall. The role of syntactic knowledge, involving knowledge about word positioning in a verbal sequence, has been explored to a lesser extent but is of theoretical interest given that this type of knowledge may also support serial order recall in multi-item sequences. This hypothesis has not been supported so far, either by French or German language studies. The present research reexamines the impact of syntactic knowledge on WM for lists of adjective-noun pairs by controlling for short-term syntactic predictability of memoranda. Contrary to previous studies, across two experiments involving French and German, we observed enhanced order recall accuracy for adjective-noun pairs presented in legal syntactic order, as well as more order migration errors for pairs in illegal syntactic order. This study is the first to demonstrate that long-term syntactic structures do support recall of serial order information in WM, consistent with hybrid and full linguistic accounts of verbal WM.
Disciplines :
Neurosciences & behavior
Author, co-author :
Xiao, Hong ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Psychologie et Neuroscience Cognitives (PsyNCog)
Schweppe, Judith; Department of Educational Sciences, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany ; Department of Psychology, University of Passau, Passau, Germany
Querella, Pauline ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie > Mémoire et langage
Attout, Lucie ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie > Mémoire et langage ; Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Contier, Friederike; Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Majerus, Steve ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Psychologie et Neuroscience Cognitives (PsyNCog)
Language :
English
Title :
Syntactic knowledge does support working memory for serial order: A comparison across French and German languages.
This work was supported by a grant from Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) Fellowship awarded to Hong Xiao. We would like to thank all the participants for the time invested in this study, and thank Magdalena Pucher, Christina Gerweth, Lara Hellmann, Jessica Wagner, and Philipp Radloff, and other students who helped us with the data collection.
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