Intonation does aid serial recall after all

Abstract

A sequence of spoken digits is easier to recall if the digits are grouped into smaller chunks (e.g., through the insertion of pauses). It has been claimed that intonation does not facilitate recall over and above the effect achieved by pauses. This may be related to the fact that past research has used synthesized intonation contours. In this replication study, we show that intonation does provide benefits once more naturalistic intonation contours are used. This benefit is independent of response modality (spoken responses, keyboard responses, or handwritten responses in a grid). We furthermore show that intonation differentially affects specific positions within the sequence of digits. Crucially, our results suggest that researchers and clinicians need to pay attention to intonation when assessing working memory using spoken language.

Grouping by Time and Pitch Facilitates Free but Not Cued Recall for Word Lists in Normally-Hearing Listeners

“…The plot of recall by position also suggested a “mini-primacy” effect interrupting the smoothness of the primacy-recency curve in the grouped conditions, as has been seen in the literature ( Parmentier & Maybery, 2008 ; Savino et al, 2020 ). As before, this was investigated in a post-hoc test for the effect of condition at each position of the data, with a Bonferroni correction for 10 tests.…”

“…He found that manipulating the mean fundamental frequency (F0) of different words, in and of itself, did not enhance recall; rather, it only helped when the F0 pattern suggested a grouping of the words (Frankish, 1989;1995). This grouping phenomenon has since been demonstrated using a number of characteristics of the auditory signal: pitch, timing, voice, stress, sound location-or even explicit instruction (Bower, 1970;Farrell, 2008;Farrell et al, 2011;Gilbert et al, 2014;Ng & Maybery, 2002;Parmentier & Maybery, 2008;Savino et al, 2014;Savino et al, 2020;Towse et al, 1999). As long as any of these characteristics indicate a grouping, recall is enhanced, and this grouping becomes a cue for memory.…”

“…When comparing the relative strengths of pitch and timing in support of memory, there is some disagreement in the literature. For example, Savino and colleagues recently found that the effect of intonation grouping was stronger than the effect of temporal grouping, provided that a natural within-word intonation was used ( Savino et al, 2020 ). On the other hand, a number of earlier papers had found that the effect of temporal grouping is stronger ( Gilbert, Boucher & Jemel, 2015 ; Parmentier & Maybery, 2008 ; Silverman, 2007 , 2010 ).…”

Pupillometry reveals effects of pitch manipulations both within and across words on listening effort and short-term memory

“…Therefore, it is likely that using a similar dual-task paradigm, degraded pitch information would increase the listening effort during speech decoding, leaving fewer resources for memorizing the items. In addition, there is some evidence that certain pitch patterns in spoken material (across words) can improve immediate free recall for NH listeners [31][32][33][34][35] . It is unclear whether such phenomena would hold with abnormal pitch patterns (within or across words) but this represents an additional route by which pitch degradations could impair the secondary task in a dual-task paradigm.…”

“…We compared a xed condition (identical to the monotonized condition of experiment 1) with a melodic condition, in which monotonized words were presented at different mean F0s ("notes"), making an arpeggio-like sequence of pitches. It was not known how this pitch pattern would affect recall, if at all: there are various studies showing pitch patterns to be either helpful, irrelevant, or even detrimental to short-term memory of words 31,32,34,35,[51][52][53] . These manipulations will help us understand whether access to salient pitch information supports word decoding and storage.…”