The serial order system in word production and working memory: A case series approach

Serial order is important in verbal behavior, such as sequencing words in working memory (WM) or arranging phonemes during speech. In both WM and word production, distinct processes are found for item identity and their serial order. In the current study, we investigated whether a shared system supports the serial order of verbal items (phonemes or words) across cognitive functions (WM and production) and tasks (repetition and naming). We recruited 30 participants with chronic stroke-induced aphasia. We examined WM abilities to recall item and serial order information using immediate serial recall tasks of words. We also assessed the ability to accurately sequence phonemes in word repetition and naming tasks, with its impairment indexed by the proportion of misordered phonemes among all incorrect phonemes compared to chance in phonologically related word and nonword responses. We examined how variability of this index of serial order impairment in repetition and naming relates to item and serial order WM capacities. Our findings reveal that serial order WM capacity, but not item WM capacity, was associated with the severity of serial order impairment in repetition, indicating a shared serial order system for WM and repetition. We also found that item WM, but not serial order WM, was associated with serial order impairment in naming, implying an item WM buffer for phonemic sequencing in naming. These results suggest distinct sequencing processes for repetition and naming, each linked to different WM mechanisms. Implications for word production models and the relationship between WM and word production are discussed.

The phonological store of working memory: A critique and an alternative, perceptual-motor, approach to verbal short-term memory

A key quality of a good theory is its fruitfulness, one measure of which might be the degree to which it compels researchers to test it, refine it, or offer alternative explanations of the same empirical data. Perhaps the most fruitful element of Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) Working Memory framework has been the concept of a short-term phonological store, a discrete cognitive module dedicated to the passive storage of verbal material that is architecturally fractionated from perceptual, language, and articulatory systems. This review discusses how the phonological store construct has served as the main theoretical springboard for an alternative perceptual-motor approach in which serial-recall performance reflects the opportunistic co-opting of the articulatory-planning system and, when auditory material is involved, the products of obligatory auditory perceptual organisation. It is argued that this approach, which rejects the need to posit a distinct short-term store, provides a better account of the two putative empirical hallmarks of the phonological store-the phonological similarity effect and the irrelevant speech effect-and that it shows promise too in being able to account for nonword repetition and word-form learning, the supposed evolved function of the phonological store. The neuropsychological literature cited as strong additional support for the phonological store concept is also scrutinised through the lens of the perceptual-motor approach for the first time and a tentative articulatory-planning deficit hypothesis for the "short-term memory" patient profile is advanced. Finally, the relation of the perceptual-motor approach to other "emergent-property" accounts of short-term memory is briefly considered.

A shared serial order system for verbal working memory and language production: evidence from aphasia

Many aspects of human performance require producing sequences of items in serial order. The current study takes a multiple-case approach to investigate whether the system responsible for serial order is shared across cognitive domains, focusing on working memory (WM) and word production. Serial order performance in three individuals with post-stroke language and verbal WM disorders (hereafter persons with aphasia, PWAs) were assessed using recognition and recall tasks for verbal and visuospatial WM, as well as error analyses in spoken and written production tasks to assess whether there was a tendency to produce the correct phonemes/letters in the wrong order. One PWA exhibited domain-specific serial order deficits in verbal and visuospatial WM. The PWA with verbal serial order WM deficit made more serial order errors than expected by chance in both repetition and writing-to-dictation tasks, whereas the other two PWAs showed no serial order deficits in verbal WM and production tasks. These findings suggest separable serial order systems for verbal and visuospatial WM and a shared system for serial order processing in verbal WM and word production. Implications for the domain-generality of WM, its connection to language production, and serial order processing across cognitive functionssc are discussed.

Sequential syntactic knowledge supports item but not order recall in verbal working memory

Previous studies have shown that psycholinguistic effects such as lexico-semantic knowledge effects mainly determine item recall in verbal working memory (WM). However, we may expect that syntactic knowledge, involving knowledge about word-level sequential aspects of language, should also impact serial-order aspects of recall in WM. Evidence for this assumption is scarce and inconsistent and has been conducted in language with deterministic syntactic rules. In languages such as French, word position is determined in a probabilistic manner: an adjective is placed before or after a noun, depending on its lexico-semantic properties. We exploited this specificity of the French language for examining the impact of syntactic positional knowledge on both item and serial order recall in verbal WM. We presented lists with adjective-noun pairs for immediate serial recall, the adjectives being in regular or irregular position relative to the nouns. We observed increased recall performance when adjectives occurred in regular position; this effect was observed for item recall but not order recall scores. We propose an integration of verbal WM and syntactic processing models to account for this finding by assuming that the impact of syntactic knowledge on serial-order WM recall is indirect and mediated via syntax-dependent item-retrieval processes.

Lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory in sentence-like lists

We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated. Participants were more likely to recall words in the correct position when presented with a verb over a noun in the verb position, a good dative verb over an intransitive verb in the verb position, and an animate noun over an inanimate noun in the subject noun position. These results demonstrate that interactions between words and their context in the form of lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory.

From long-term to short-term: Distinct neural networks underlying semantic knowledge and its recruitment in working memory

Although numerous studies suggest that working memory (WM) and semantic long-term knowledge interact, the nature and underlying neural mechanisms of this intervention remain poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigated the extent to which neural markers of semantic knowledge in long-term memory (LTM) are activated during the WM maintenance stage in 32 young adults. First, the multivariate neural patterns associated with four semantic categories were determined via an implicit semantic activation task. Next, the participants maintained words - the names of the four semantic categories implicitly activated in the first task - in a verbal WM task. Multi-voxel pattern analyses showed reliable neural decoding of the four semantic categories in the implicit semantic activation and the verbal WM tasks. Critically, however, no between-task classification of semantic categories was observed. Searchlight analyses showed that for the WM task, semantic category information could be decoded in anterior temporal areas associated with abstract semantic category knowledge. In the implicit semantic activation task, semantic category information was decoded in superior temporal, occipital and frontal cortices associated with domain-specific semantic feature representations. These results indicate that item-level semantic activation during verbal WM involves shallow rather than deep semantic information.

Remembering conversation in group settings

Individuals can take on various roles in conversation. Some roles are more active, with the participant responsible for guiding that conversation in pursuit of the group's goals. Other roles are more passive, like when one is an overhearer. Classic accounts posit that overhearers do not form conversational common ground because they do not actively participate in the communication process. Indeed, empirical findings demonstrate that overhearers do not comprehend conversation as well as active participants. Little is known, however, about long-term memory for conversations in overhearers. Overhearers play an important role in legal settings and dispute resolution, and it is critical to understand how their memory differs in quality and content from active participants in conversation. Here we examine - for the first time - the impact of one's conversational role as a speaker, addressee, or overhearer on subsequent memory for conversation. Data from 60 participants recalling 60 conversations reveal that after a brief delay, overhearers recall significantly less content from conversation compared to both speakers and addressees, and that the content they do recall is less accurately sourced to its actual contributor. Mnemonic similarity is higher between active conversational participants than between active participants and overhearers. These findings provide key support for the hypothesis that the process of forming common ground in interactive conversation shapes and supports memory for that conversation.

The functional connectome of 3,4-methyldioxymethamphetamine-related declarative memory impairments

The chronic intake of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, "ecstasy") bears a strong risk for sustained declarative memory impairments. Although such memory deficits have been repeatedly reported, their neurofunctional origin remains elusive. Therefore, we here investigate the neuronal basis of altered declarative memory in recurrent MDMA users at the level of brain connectivity. We examined a group of 44 chronic MDMA users and 41 demographically matched controls. Declarative memory performance was assessed by the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and a visual associative learning test. To uncover alterations in the whole brain connectome between groups, we employed a data-driven multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) approach on participants' resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Recent MDMA use was confirmed by hair analyses. MDMA users showed lower performance in delayed recall across tasks compared to well-matched controls with moderate-to-strong effect sizes. MVPA revealed a large cluster located in the left postcentral gyrus of global connectivity differences between groups. Post hoc seed-based connectivity analyses with this cluster unraveled hypoconnectivity to temporal areas belonging to the auditory network and hyperconnectivity to dorsal parietal regions belonging to the dorsal attention network in MDMA users. Seed-based connectivity strength was associated with verbal memory performance in the whole sample as well as with MDMA intake patterns in the user group. Our findings suggest that functional underpinnings of MDMA-related memory impairments encompass altered patterns of multimodal sensory integration within auditory processing regions to a functional heteromodal connector hub, the left postcentral gyrus. In addition, hyperconnectivity in regions of a cognitive control network might indicate compensation for degraded sensory processing.

Information-theoretic principles in incremental language production

I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate-distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in human language production, which is grounded in information theory and control theory. Language production is cast as the sequential selection of actions to achieve a communicative goal subject to a capacity constraint on cognitive control. In a series of calculations, simulations, corpus analyses, and comparisons to experimental data, I show that the model directly predicts some of the major known qualitative and quantitative phenomena in language production, including semantic interference and predictability effects in word choice; accessibility-based ("easy-first") production preferences in word order alternations; and the existence and distribution of disfluencies including filled pauses, corrections, and false starts. I connect the rate-distortion view to existing models of human language production, to probabilistic models of semantics and pragmatics, and to proposals for controlled language generation in the machine learning and reinforcement learning literature.

Noun Sequence Statistics Affect Serial Recall and Order Recognition Memory

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.

Understanding language processing in variable populations on their own terms: Towards a functionalist psycholinguistics of individual differences, development, and disorders

Classic psycholinguistics seeks universal language mechanisms for all people, emphasing the "modal" listener: hearing, neurotypical, monolingual, young adults. Applied psycholinguistics then characterizes differences in terms of their deviation from modal. This mirrors naturalist philosophies of health which presume a normal function, with illness as a deviation. In contrast, normative positions argue that illness is partially culturally derived. It occurs when a person cannot meet socio-culturally defined goals, separating differences in biology (disease) from socio-cultural function (illness). We synthesize this with mechanistic functionalist views in which language emerges from diverse lower level mechanisms with no one-to-one mapping to function (termed the functional mechanistic normative approach). This challenges primarily psychometric approaches-which are culturally defined-suggesting a process-based approach may yield more insight. We illustrate this with work on word recognition across multiple domains: cochlear implant users, children, language disorders, L2 learners, and aging. This work investigates each group's solutions to the problem of word recognition as interesting in its own right. Variation in process is value-neutral, and psychometric measures complement this, reflecting fit with cultural expectations (disease vs. illness). By examining variation in processing across people with a variety of skills and goals, we arrive at deeper insight into fundamental principles.

Utterance planning under message uncertainty: evidence from a novel picture-naming paradigm

Language researchers view utterance planning as implicit decision-making: producers must choose the words, sentence structures, and various other linguistic features to communicate their message. To date, much of the research on utterance planning has focused on situations in which the speaker knows the full message to convey. Less is known about circumstances in which speakers begin utterance planning before they are certain about their message. In three picture-naming experiments, we used a novel paradigm to examine how speakers plan utterances before a full message is known. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed displays showing two pairs of objects, followed by a cue to name one pair. In an Overlap condition, one object appeared in both pairs, providing early information about one of the objects to name. In a Different condition, there was no object overlap. Across both spoken and typed responses, participants tended to name the overlapping target first in the Overlap condition, with shorter initiation latencies compared with other utterances. Experiment 3 used a semantically constraining question to provide early information about the upcoming targets, and participants tended to name the more likely target first in their response. These results suggest that in situations of uncertainty, producers choose word orders that allow them to begin early planning. Producers prioritize message components that are certain to be needed and continue planning the rest when more information becomes available. Given similarities to planning strategies for other goal-directed behaviors, we suggest continuity between decision-making processes in language and other cognitive domains.

The Role of Working Memory, Short-Term Memory, Speed of Processing, Education, and Locality in Verb-Related Morphosyntactic Production: Evidence From Greek

This study investigates the relationship between verb-related morphosyntactic production (VRMP) and locality (i.e., critical cue being adjacent to the target or not), verbal Working Memory (vWM), nonverbal/visuospatial WM (nvWM), verbal short-term memory (vSTM), nonverbal/visuospatial STM (nvSTM), speed of processing, and education. Eighty healthy middle-aged and older Greek-speaking participants were administered a sentence completion task tapping into production of subject–verb Agreement, Time Reference/Tense, and grammatical Aspect in local and nonlocal configurations, and cognitive tasks tapping into vSTM, nvSTM, vWM, nvWM, and speed of processing. Aspect elicited worse performance than Time Reference and Agreement, and Time Reference elicited worse performance than Agreement. There were main effects of vSTM, vWM, education, and locality: the greater the participants’ vSTM/vWM capacity, and the higher their educational level, the better their VRMP; nonlocal configurations elicited worse performance on VRMP than local configurations. Moreover, vWM affected Aspect and Time Reference/Tense more than Agreement, and education affected VRMP more in local than in nonlocal configurations. Lastly, locality affected Agreement and Aspect (with nonlocal configurations eliciting more agreement and aspect errors than local configurations) but not Time Reference. That vSTM/vWM (but not nvSTM/nvWM) were found to subserve VRMP suggests that VRMP is predominantly supported by domain-specific, not by domain-general, memory resources. The main effects of vWM and vSTM suggest that both the processing and storage components of WM are relevant to VRMP. That vWM (but not vSTM) interacts with production of Aspect, Time Reference, and Agreement suggests that Aspect and Time Reference are computationally more demanding than Agreement. These findings are consistent with earlier findings that, in individuals with aphasia, vWM interacts with production of Aspect, Time Reference, and Agreement. The differential effect of education on VRMP in local vs. nonlocal configurations could be accounted for by assuming that education is a proxy for an assumed procedural memory system that is sensitive to frequency patterns in language and better supports VRMP in more frequent than in less frequent configurations. In the same vein, the interaction between locality and the three morphosyntactic categories might reflect the statistical distribution of local vs. nonlocal Aspect, Agreement, and Time Reference/Tense in Greek.

Effects of verbal tasks on driving simulator performance

We report results from a driving simulator paradigm we developed to test the fine temporal effects of verbal tasks on simultaneous tracking performance. A total of 74 undergraduate students participated in two experiments in which they controlled a cursor using the steering wheel to track a moving target and where the dependent measure was overall deviation from target. Experiment 1 tested tracking performance during slow and fast target speeds under conditions involving either no verbal input or output, passive listening to spoken prompts via headphones, or responding to spoken prompts. Experiment 2 was similar except that participants read written prompts overlain on the simulator screen instead of listening to spoken prompts. Performance in both experiments was worse during fast speeds and worst overall during responding conditions. Most significantly, fine scale time-course analysis revealed deteriorating tracking performance as participants prepared and began speaking and steadily improving performance while speaking. Additionally, post-block survey data revealed that conversation recall was best in responding conditions, and perceived difficulty increased with task complexity. Our study is the first to track temporal changes in interference at high resolution during the first hundreds of milliseconds of verbal production and comprehension. Our results are consistent with load-based theories of multitasking performance and show that language production, and, to a lesser extent, language comprehension tap resources also used for tracking. More generally, our paradigm provides a useful tool for measuring dynamical changes in tracking performance during verbal tasks due to the rapidly changing resource requirements of language production and comprehension.

Animacy-induced conflict in sentence production and comprehension from late childhood to adolescence

Some animacy configurations elicit parallel semantic interference in adult production and comprehension; for example, phrases with similar animate nouns like the man that the girl is hugging are more difficult than phrases like the doll that the girl is hugging. Yet little is known about how this interference manifests in development, particularly, beyond early childhood. Because frontal brain maturation and cognitive control improvements are known to occur across late childhood and adolescence, we investigated (a) how animacy-induced difficulty in production and comprehension vary with age throughout this period and (b) whether control processes reflected in the backward digit span (BDS) test uniquely explained these differences besides other language measures. In separate tasks, participants (8- to 15-year-old children; N = 91) heard auditory descriptions of depicted characters, produced characters' descriptions, and completed BDS, vocabulary, and reading experience tests. Results indicated that, as in adults, animacy modulated performance in production and comprehension across all ages. The animacy modulation interacted with age in production but not in comprehension, suggesting age-related animacy differences in production but relatively stable differences in comprehension despite processing speed improvements. Importantly, these age-related production differences were also modulated by the BDS scores; only participants with higher BDS scores displayed age-related animacy differences. Together, these results indicate that comprehension and production develop at different rates and that the development of BDS performance interacts with age-dependent changes in sentence planning from late childhood to adolescence. More generally, the study highlights tasks' disparities to be explained by cognitive and developmental models of language.

Syntax, morphosyntax, and serial recall: How language supports short-term memory

In the classic view of verbal short-term memory, immediate recall is achieved by maintaining phonological representations, while the influence of other linguistic information is negligible. According to language-based accounts, short-term retention of verbal material is inherently bound to language production and comprehension, thus also influenced by semantic or syntactic factors. In line with this, serial recall is better when lists are presented in a canonical word order for English rather than in a noncanonical order (e.g., when adjectives precede nouns rather than vice versa; Perham et al., 2009, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62[7], 1285–1293). However, in many languages, grammaticality is not exclusively determined by word order. In German, an adjective–noun sequence is grammatical only if the adjective is inflected in congruence with the noun’s person, number, and grammatical gender. Therefore, we investigated whether similar effects of syntactic word order occur in German. In two modified replications of Perham et al.’s study, we presented lists of three pairs of adjectives and nouns, presented in adjective–noun or in noun–adjective order. In addition, we manipulated morphosyntactic congruence between nouns and adjectives within pairs (Exp. 1: congruently inflected vs. uninflected adjectives; Exp. 2: congruently inflected vs. incongruently inflected adjectives). Both experiments show an interaction: Word order affected recall performance only when adjectives were inflected in congruence with the corresponding noun. These findings are in line with language-based models and indicate that, in a language that determines grammaticality in an interplay of syntactic and morphosyntactic factors, word order alone is not sufficient to improve verbal short-term memory.

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks. Modern theories of comprehension emphasize that people learn a vast web of correlated information about the language and the world and must activate that information from long-term memory to cope with the demands of language input. To date, there has been little consideration in theories of verbal working memory for how this rich input from comprehension would affect the nature of temporary memory. There has also been relatively little attention to the degree to which language production processes naturally manage serial order of verbal information. The authors argue for an emergent model of verbal working memory supported by a rich, distributed long-term memory for language. On this view, comprehension processes provide encoding in verbal working memory tasks, and production processes maintenance, serial ordering, and recall. Moreover, the computational capacity to maintain and order information varies with language experience. Implications for theories of working memory, comprehension, and production are considered.

Initiation of utterance planning in response to pre-recorded and "live" utterances

In everyday conversation, interlocutors often plan their utterances while listening to their conversational partners, thereby achieving short gaps between their turns. Important issues for current psycholinguistics are how interlocutors distribute their attention between listening and speech planning and how speech planning is timed relative to listening. Laboratory studies addressing these issues have used a variety of paradigms, some of which have involved using recorded speech to which participants responded, whereas others have involved interactions with confederates. This study investigated how this variation in the speech input affected the participants' timing of speech planning. In Experiment 1, participants responded to utterances produced by a confederate, who sat next to them and looked at the same screen. In Experiment 2, they responded to recorded utterances of the same confederate. Analyses of the participants' speech, their eye movements, and their performance in a concurrent tapping task showed that, compared with recorded speech, the presence of the confederate increased the processing load for the participants, but did not alter their global sentence planning strategy. These results have implications for the design of psycholinguistic experiments and theories of listening and speaking in dyadic settings.

Working Memory Profiles of Children With Dyslexia, Developmental Language Disorder, or Both

Purpose Compared to children with typical development, children with dyslexia, developmental language disorder (DLD), or both often demonstrate working memory deficits. It is unclear how pervasive the deficits are or whether the deficits align with diagnostic category. The purpose of this study was to determine whether different working memory profiles would emerge on a comprehensive battery of central executive, phonological, visuospatial, and binding working memory tasks and whether these profiles were associated with group membership. Method Three hundred two 2nd graders with typical development, dyslexia, DLD, or dyslexia/DLD completed 13 tasks from the Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children-Working Memory ( Gray, Alt, Hogan, Green, & Cowan, n.d. ) that assessed central executive, phonological, and visuospatial/attention components of working memory. Results Latent class analyses yielded 4 distinct latent classes: low overall (21%), average with high number updating (30%), average with low number updating (12%), and high overall (37%). Children from each disability group and children from the typically developing group were present in each class. Discussion Findings highlight the importance of knowing an individual child's working memory profile because working memory profiles are not synonymous with learning disabilities diagnosis. Thus, working memory assessments could contribute important information about children's cognitive function over and above typical psychoeducational measures.

Investigating Perceptual Biases, Data Reliability, and Data Discovery in a Methodology for Collecting Speech Errors From Audio Recordings

This work describes a methodology of collecting speech errors from audio recordings and investigates how some of its assumptions affect data quality and composition. Speech errors of all types (sound, lexical, syntactic, etc.) were collected by eight data collectors from audio recordings of unscripted English speech. Analysis of these errors showed that: (i) different listeners find different errors in the same audio recordings, but (ii) the frequencies of error patterns are similar across listeners; (iii) errors collected "online" using on the spot observational techniques are more likely to be affected by perceptual biases than "offline" errors collected from audio recordings; and (iv) datasets built from audio recordings can be explored and extended in a number of ways that traditional corpus studies cannot be.

Language Performance of Individuals at Risk for Mild Cognitive Impairment

Purpose Evidence exists that changes in language performance may be an early indicator of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), often a harbinger of dementing disease. The purpose of this study was the evaluation of language performance in individuals at risk for MCI by virtue of age and self-concern and its relation to performance on tests of memory, visuospatial function, and mental status. Method Eighty-three individuals 55 years or older were administered the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia ( Bayles & Tomoeda, 1993 ), a standardized battery with normative data from 86 healthy older adults (HOAs) and 86 individuals with Alzheimer's dementia, the most common dementing disease. A performance criterion of 1-1.5 SDs below the mean of HOAs defined MCI, as recommended in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. We hypothesized that (a) the majority of at-risk participants would score 1 SD or more below the mean of HOAs on 1 or more subtests and (b) language performance tests would present a greater challenge than memory, mental status, and visuospatial construction tests. Results Both hypotheses were confirmed. Sixty-two participants (74.6%) met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, criteria on at least 1 subtest. Moreover, language subtests were those most likely to elicit a performance 1 SD or more below the mean of HOAs. Conclusions Language performance deficits can appear early before impairment in episodic memory, visuospatial construction ability, or mental status in individuals at risk for MCI. Speech-language pathologists are uniquely qualified to identify subtle changes in language, and standardized language tests with normative data should be used when testing for MCI.

The Meeting Point: Where Language Production and Working Memory Share Resources

The interaction between working memory and language processing is widely discussed in cognitive research. However, those studies often explore the relationship between language comprehension and working memory (WM). The role of WM is rarely considered in language production, despite some evidence suggesting a relationship between the two cognitive systems. This study attempts to fill that gap by using a complex span task during language production. We make our predictions based on the reorganization of elementary functions neurocognitive model, a usage based theory about grammatical status, and language production models. In accordance with these theories, we expect an overlap between language production and WM at one or more levels of language planning. Our results show that WM is involved at the phonological encoding level of language production and that adding WM load facilitates language production, which leads us to suggest that an extra task-specific storage is being created while the task is performed.

The time for action is at hand

The science of mental life and behavior has paid scant attention to the means by which mental life is translated into physical behavior. Why this is so was the topic of a 2005 American Psychologist article whose main title was "The Cinderella of Psychology." In the present article, we briefly review some of the reasons why motor control was relegated to the sidelines of psychology. Then we point to work showing that experimental psychologists have much to contribute to research on action generation. We focus on studies showing that actions are generated in a way that, at least by default, minimize changes between successive actions. The method is computationally as well as physically economical but also requires consideration of costs, including costs of different kinds. How such costs are compared is discussed in the next section. The final section offers comments about the future of psychologically focused action research. Two additional themes of the review concern methods for studying action generation. First, much can be learned through naturalistic observation. Second, subsequent experiments, designed to check naturalistic observations, can use very simple equipment and procedures. This can make the study of action generation easy to pursue in the psychology laboratory.

The interaction of notional number and morphophonology in subject-verb agreement: A role for working memory

Research shows that cross-linguistically, subject-verb agreement with complex noun phrases (e.g., The label on the bottles) is influenced by notional number and the presence of homophony in case, gender, or number morphology. Less well-understood is whether notional number and morphophonology interact during speech production, and whether the relative impact of these two factors is influenced by working memory capacity. Using an auditory sentence completion task, we investigated the impact of notional number and morphophonology on agreement with complex subject noun phrases in Dutch. Results revealed main effects of notional number and morphophonology. Critically, there was also an interaction between morphophonology and notional number because participants showed greater notional effects when the determiners were homophonous and morphophonologically ambiguous. Furthermore, participants with higher working memory scores made fewer agreement errors when the subject noun phrase contained homophonous determiners, and this effect was greater when the subject noun phrase was notionally singular. These findings support the hypothesis that cue-based retrieval plays a role in agreement production, and suggests that the ability to correctly assign subject-verb agreement-especially in the presence of homophonous determiners-is modulated by working memory capacity.

Production Practice During Language Learning Improves Comprehension

Language learners often spend more time comprehending than producing a new language. However, memory research suggests reasons to suspect that production practice might provide a stronger learning experience than comprehension practice. We tested the benefits of production during language learning and the degree to which this learning transfers to comprehension skill. We taught participants an artificial language containing multiple linguistic dependencies. Participants were randomly assigned to either a production- or a comprehension-learning condition, with conditions designed to balance attention demands and other known production-comprehension differences. After training, production-learning participants outperformed comprehension-learning participants on vocabulary comprehension and on comprehension tests of grammatical dependencies, even when we controlled for individual differences in vocabulary learning. This result shows that producing a language during learning can improve subsequent comprehension, which has implications for theories of memory and learning, language representations, and educational practices.

Exploring the sentence advantage in working memory: Insights from serial recall and recognition

Immediate serial recall of sentences has been shown to be superior to that of unrelated words. This study was designed to further explore how this effect might emerge in recall and to establish whether it also extends to serial recognition, a different form of response task that has relatively reduced output requirements. Using auditory or visual presentation of sequences, we found a substantial advantage for sentences over lists in serial recall, an effect shown on measures of recall accuracy, order, intrusion, and omission errors and reflected in transposition gradients. In contrast however, recognition memory based on a standard change detection paradigm gave only weak and inconsistent evidence for a sentence superiority effect. However, when a more sensitive staircase procedure imported from psychophysics was used, a clear sentence advantage was found although the effect sizes were smaller than those observed in serial recall. These findings suggest that sentence recall benefits from automatic processes that utilise long-term knowledge across encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Fractionating nonword repetition: The contributions of short-term memory and oromotor praxis are different

The ability to reproduce novel words is a sensitive marker of language impairment across a variety of developmental disorders. Nonword repetition tasks are thought to reflect phonological short-term memory skills. Yet, when children hear and then utter a word for the first time, they must transform a novel speech signal into a series of coordinated, precisely timed oral movements. Little is known about how children's oromotor speed, planning and co-ordination abilities might influence their ability to repeat novel nonwords, beyond the influence of higher-level cognitive and linguistic skills. In the present study, we tested 35 typically developing children between the ages of 5-8 years on measures of nonword repetition, digit span, memory for non-verbal sequences, reading fluency, oromotor praxis, and oral diadochokinesis. We found that oromotor praxis uniquely predicted nonword repetition ability in school-age children, and that the variance it accounted for was additional to that of digit span, memory for non-verbal sequences, articulatory rate (measured by oral diadochokinesis) as well as reading fluency. We conclude that the ability to compute and execute novel sensorimotor transformations affects the production of novel words. These results have important implications for understanding motor/language relations in neurodevelopmental disorders.