The linguistic foundations of verbal working memory: further evidence from syntactic knowledge effects

An increasing number of studies highlight the interactions between verbal WM and language knowledge, particularly at phonological and lexico-semantic levels, and regarding recall of item rather than serial order information in WM. The influence of syntactic knowledge on verbal WM has been investigated to a much lesser extent but could be theoretically informative, as syntactic knowledge is, by definition, sequential knowledge that should also impact the maintenance of serial order information in WM.
We administered to 93 French-speaking participants an immediate serial recall task involving adjective-noun pairs presented in a syntactically preferred or non-preferred order relative to adjective anteposition-postposition regularities of the French language. By using a mixed-list design (both adjective-noun and noun-adjective ordering can occur in the same list, contrary to previous studies), we observed an impact of syntactic regularity on recall performance for both item and order aspects of recall performance. This is the first study to highlight an impact of syntactic knowledge on both item and order aspects of verbal WM. These results support the pivotal role of syntactic knowledge in WM for serial order, contributing to a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between linguistic and WM systems.