Schwering Steven C, MacDonald Maryellen C
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2023 Aug 11;7:550-563. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00092. eCollection 2023.
Most theories of verbal working memory recognize that language comprehension and production processes play a role in word memory for familiar sequences, but not for novel lists of nouns. Some language emergent theories propose that language processes can support verbal working memory even for novel sequences. Through corpus analyses, we identify sequences of two nouns that resemble patterns in natural language, even though the sequences are novel. We present 2 experiments demonstrating better recall in college students for these novel sequences over the same words in reverse order. In a third experiment, we demonstrate better recognition of the order of these sequences over a longer time scale. These results suggest verbal working memory and recognition of order over a delay are influenced by language knowledge processes, even for novel memoranda that approximate noun lists typically employed in memory experiments.
大多数言语工作记忆理论都认为，语言理解和生成过程在熟悉序列的单词记忆中发挥作用，但在新的名词列表记忆中则不然。一些语言涌现理论提出，即使对于新的序列，语言过程也可以支持言语工作记忆。通过语料库分析，我们识别出两个名词的序列，它们类似于自然语言中的模式，尽管这些序列是新的。我们进行了两项实验，结果表明大学生对这些新序列的回忆要优于对相同单词倒序排列的回忆。在第三项实验中，我们证明在更长的时间范围内，对这些序列顺序的识别效果更好。这些结果表明，即使对于近似于记忆实验中通常使用的名词列表的新记忆材料，言语工作记忆和延迟后的顺序识别也会受到语言知识过程的影响。
