Rudner Mary, Orfanidou Eleni, Cardin Velia, Capek Cheryl M, Woll Bencie, Rönnberg Jerker
Linnaeus Centre HEAD and Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, London, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2016 May;44(4):608-20. doi: 10.3758/s13421-016-0585-z.
Working memory (WM) for spoken language improves when the to-be-remembered items correspond to preexisting representations in long-term memory. We investigated whether this effect generalizes to the visuospatial domain by administering a visual n-back WM task to deaf signers and hearing signers, as well as to hearing nonsigners. Four different kinds of stimuli were presented: British Sign Language (BSL; familiar to the signers), Swedish Sign Language (SSL; unfamiliar), nonsigns, and nonlinguistic manual actions. The hearing signers performed better with BSL than with SSL, demonstrating a facilitatory effect of preexisting semantic representation. The deaf signers also performed better with BSL than with SSL, but only when WM load was high. No effect of preexisting phonological representation was detected. The deaf signers performed better than the hearing nonsigners with all sign-based materials, but this effect did not generalize to nonlinguistic manual actions. We argue that deaf signers, who are highly reliant on visual information for communication, develop expertise in processing sign-based items, even when those items do not have preexisting semantic or phonological representations. Preexisting semantic representation, however, enhances the quality of the gesture-based representations temporarily maintained in WM by this group, thereby releasing WM resources to deal with increased load. Hearing signers, on the other hand, may make strategic use of their speech-based representations for mnemonic purposes. The overall pattern of results is in line with flexible-resource models of WM.
当需要记忆的项目与长期记忆中预先存在的表征相对应时，口语的工作记忆（WM）会得到改善。我们通过对聋人手语使用者、听力正常的手语使用者以及听力正常的非手语使用者进行视觉n-back工作记忆任务，来研究这种效应是否也适用于视觉空间领域。呈现了四种不同类型的刺激：英国手语（BSL；手语使用者熟悉）、瑞典手语（SSL；不熟悉）、非手语符号以及非语言手部动作。听力正常的手语使用者对BSL的表现比对SSL更好，这表明预先存在的语义表征具有促进作用。聋人手语使用者对BSL的表现也比对SSL更好，但仅在工作记忆负荷较高时如此。未检测到预先存在的语音表征的影响。聋人手语使用者在所有基于手语的材料上的表现都优于听力正常的非手语使用者，但这种效应并未推广到非语言手部动作。我们认为，高度依赖视觉信息进行交流的聋人手语使用者，即使在那些项目没有预先存在的语义或语音表征的情况下，也会在处理基于手语的项目方面发展出专业技能。然而，预先存在的语义表征会提高该群体在工作记忆中临时维持的基于手势的表征的质量，从而释放工作记忆资源以应对增加的负荷。另一方面，听力正常的手语使用者可能会出于记忆目的策略性地利用他们基于言语的表征。结果的总体模式与工作记忆的灵活资源模型一致。
