Xiao Hong, Schweppe Judith, Querella Pauline, Attout Lucie, Contier Friederike, Majerus Steve
Department of Psychology, Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, University of Liège, Place Des Orateurs 1 (B33), 4000, Liège, Belgium.
Department of Educational Sciences, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Sep 1. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01788-9.
A large body of research demonstrates robust interactions between verbal working memory (WM) and phonological and lexico-semantic language knowledge, particularly for item recall. The role of syntactic knowledge, involving knowledge about word positioning in a verbal sequence, has been explored to a lesser extent but is of theoretical interest given that this type of knowledge may also support serial order recall in multi-item sequences. This hypothesis has not been supported so far, either by French or German language studies. The present research reexamines the impact of syntactic knowledge on WM for lists of adjective-noun pairs by controlling for short-term syntactic predictability of memoranda. Contrary to previous studies, across two experiments involving French and German, we observed enhanced order recall accuracy for adjective-noun pairs presented in legal syntactic order, as well as more order migration errors for pairs in illegal syntactic order. This study is the first to demonstrate that long-term syntactic structures do support recall of serial order information in WM, consistent with hybrid and full linguistic accounts of verbal WM.
大量研究表明，言语工作记忆（WM）与语音及词汇语义语言知识之间存在强大的相互作用，尤其是在项目回忆方面。句法知识涉及单词在言语序列中的位置信息，其作用虽已有所探讨，但程度相对较小。鉴于此类知识可能也支持多项目序列中的顺序回忆，因而具有理论研究价值。到目前为止，无论是法语还是德语的语言研究都尚未支持这一假设。本研究通过控制记忆材料的短期句法可预测性，重新审视了句法知识对形容词 - 名词对列表的工作记忆的影响。与以往研究不同，在涉及法语和德语的两个实验中，我们观察到，合法句法顺序呈现的形容词 - 名词对的顺序回忆准确性有所提高，非法句法顺序的对出现的顺序迁移错误更多。本研究首次证明，长期句法结构确实支持工作记忆中顺序信息的回忆，这与言语工作记忆的混合及完整语言理论相符。
