The roles of long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge in phonological short-term memory

Abstract

Many previous studies have explored and confirmed the influence of long-term phonological representations on phonological short-term memory. In most investigations, phonological effects have been explored with respect to phonotactic constraints or frequency. If interaction between longterm memory and phonological short-term memory is a generalized principle, then other phonological characteristicsthat is, suprasegmental aspects of phonology-should also exert similar effects on phonological short-term memory. We explored this hypothesis through three immediate serial-recall experiments that manipulated Japanese nonwords with respect to lexical prosody (pitch-accent type, reflecting suprasegmental characteristics) as well as phonotactic frequency (reflecting segmental characteristics). The results showed that phonotactic frequency affected the retention not only of the phonemic sequences, but also of pitch-accent patterns, when participants were instructed to recall both the phoneme sequence and accent pattern of nonwords. In addition, accent pattern typicality influenced the retention of the accent pattern: Typical accent patterns were recalled more accurately than atypical ones. These results indicate that both long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge contribute to phonological short-term memory performance.Keywords Working memory . Short-term memory . Phonotactic knowledge . Lexical prosodic knowledge . NonwordsSince its conception, a major component of working memory research has focused on phonological short-term memory (hereafter, pSTM), as represented by the concept of the articulatory loop (later called the phonological loop) of the original working memory model of Baddeley and Hitch (1974). The phonological loop is a subsystem that underpins the functioning of pSTM within the working memory system, which supports the temporal retention of information in the service of cognitive processes for a variety of tasks (e.g., Baddeley, 2012). In the past decade or so, awareness has increased of the important interactions between the phonological loop and long-term memory representations including language (Baddeley, 2000). These include interaction with phonological representations and semantic knowledge (Hulme, Maughan, & Brown, 1991;Jefferies, Frankish, & Lambon Ralph, 2006;Patterson, Graham, & Hodges, 1994). To date, much of this research has been limited to segmental aspects of phonology. In the present study, we expanded the range of this working memory principle to suprasegmental aspects. If the interaction between long-term representations and pSTM is a generalizable principle of working memory function, then there should be evidence for the influence of suprasegmental characteristics in working memory. This hypothesis was the focus of the present study.Currently, multiple sources of evidence point toward the influence of long-term knowledge on pSTM. For example, short-term memory performance is better for words than for nonwords (Hulme et al., 1991; Gathercole, 2009). This can be expl...

Perspectives on working memory: introduction to the special issue

“…This contrasts with previous research on immediate serial recall, and with some models of serial order that have assumed a long-term memory contribution to memory for items, but not for order. Tanida, Ueno, Lambon-Ralph, and Saito (2015) continue with this theme by demonstrating contributions from phonotactic and lexical prosody held in long-term memory to the retention of sets of Japanese materials.…”

Verbal Working Memory, Long-Term Knowledge, and Statistical Learning

“…That is, people performed better with a list of nonwords that consist of high frequency bi-phones (e.g., rin = ri + in) than those that are low frequency (e.g., keb = ke + eb) (e.g., Gathercole, Frankish, Pickering, & Peaker, 1999). The generality of this phenomenon is confirmed by the effect observed at a level of subsyllabic unit called mora in Japanese (the bi-mora frequency effect, Tanida, Ueno, Lambon Ralph, & Saito, 2015;Tanida, Nakayama, & Saito, 2019). Majerus, Martinez Perez, and Oberauer (2012) demonstrated the influences of element-to-element association knowledge that is acquired in the laboratory to verbal working memory.…”

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

“…Together, these results suggest that memory of one phoneme or acoustic pattern influences memory of others via LTM of the phonological statistical structure of language. These ''neighborhoods'' of patterns in LTM can be quite subtle, as evidenced by the improved recall for nonwords with regular pitch accent compared to irregular pitch accent, an effect moderated by phonotactic frequency (Tanida et al, 2015; see also Yuzawa and Saito, 2006). Not only do these studies suggest that LTM is relevant for VWM, but they suggest multiple grain sizes of phonological information interact to inform performance in memory tasks.…”

“…Perhaps greater adoption of graded representations of novelty could bridge the divide between language emergent and pure memory accounts. Important behavioral data linking graded phonotactic LTM to VWM (e.g., Tanida et al, 2015) and graded grammatical LTM to VWM (e.g., Jones and Farrell, 2018) already speaks to the usefulness of this approach.…”