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Verbal working memory and linguistic long-term memory: Exploring the lexical cohort effect.
Benjamin Kowialiewski1,2, Steve Majerus3,4
1Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Research Unit (PsyNCog), University of Liège, Place des Orateurs 1, 4000, Liège, Belgium. bkowialiewski@uliege.be.
Memory & Cognition
|January 20, 2019
Summary
The lexical cohort effect does not impact verbal working memory (vWM) recall. This study found no evidence that word familiarity based on shared phonemes influences vWM performance.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Verbal working memory (vWM) performance is influenced by linguistic knowledge.
- Familiarity at sublexical, lexical, and semantic levels enhances vWM recall.
- The impact of the lexical cohort effect on vWM remains unexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of the lexical cohort effect on verbal working memory (vWM) performance.
- To determine if word characteristics related to cohort size affect immediate serial recall.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Manipulated lexical cohort effect in an immediate serial recall task.
- Experiment 2: Validated cohort manipulation using a lexical decision task.
- Experiment 3: Re-tested cohort effect in immediate serial recall with optimized stimuli.
Main Results:
- No significant effect of the lexical cohort effect was found in immediate serial recall tasks (Experiments 1 and 3).
- Lexical decision tasks confirmed that cohort size influences word processing speed (Experiment 2).
- Participants responded faster to words from smaller cohorts in lexical decision tasks.
Conclusions:
- The lexical cohort effect does not appear to influence verbal working memory recall.
- Linguistic knowledge impacts vWM through continuous activation, unlike the lexical cohort effect's initial activation influence.
- The findings suggest that early-stage linguistic processing variables may not affect later-stage memory recall.
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