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Related Experiment Video

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Assessing Working Memory in Children: The Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children – Working Memory (CABC-WM)

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Hijacking limitations of working memory load to test for composition in language.

Michael T Ullman¹, Talat Bulut², Matthew Walenski³

¹Brain and Language Laboratory, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.

|July 17, 2024

Summary

English irregular verbs are easier to process than regular verbs, especially when phonologically consistent. This suggests irregular verbs may be stored whole, while regular verbs are decomposed, impacting working memory during language processing.

Keywords:

Composition Irregular Language Morphology Regular Working memory

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

The storage versus decomposition debate in language processing remains unresolved.
Working memory limitations offer a novel approach to investigate linguistic composition.
English inflectional morphology provides a well-studied paradigm for this investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

To test the hypothesis that decomposed linguistic forms impose a greater working memory load.
To investigate whether compositional (regular) English inflections are harder to maintain in working memory than non-compositional (irregular) inflections.
To identify a diagnostic tool for linguistic composition.

Main Methods:

A 3-back production task was employed to assess working memory load.
English inflectional morphology (regular vs. irregular verbs) was the focus.
Potential confounding factors including frequency, phonology, and orthography were controlled.

Main Results:

Regular inflections resulted in significantly more working memory errors than irregular inflections.
Regular forms showed more bare-stem and stem-affixation errors, indicating decomposition.
Irregular forms showed more past-tense-form errors, suggesting whole-word processing.

Conclusions:

The findings support the decomposition of regular inflections and whole-word storage of irregulars.
The regular-irregular difference was modulated by phonological consistency and participant sex, particularly for low-frequency forms.
Working memory load serves as a robust indicator of linguistic composition.