Syntactic knowledge does support working memory for serial order: A comparison across French and German languages

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Verbal working memory (WM) interacts with phonological and lexico-semantic language knowledge.
• The role of syntactic knowledge in verbal WM, particularly for serial order recall, remains less understood.
• Previous studies in French and German did not support the hypothesis that syntactic knowledge aids serial order recall in WM.

Purpose of the Study:

• To reexamine the impact of syntactic knowledge on verbal WM for lists of adjective-noun pairs.
• To investigate whether long-term syntactic structures support serial order recall in WM.
• To control for short-term syntactic predictability of memoranda.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted using French and German participants.
• Participants were tested on their recall accuracy for lists of adjective-noun pairs.
• The syntactic predictability of the memoranda was controlled.

Main Results:

• Enhanced order recall accuracy was observed for adjective-noun pairs presented in legal syntactic order.
• More order migration errors occurred for pairs presented in illegal syntactic order.
• Findings contradict previous studies that found no support for syntactic knowledge's role in verbal WM.

Conclusions:

• Long-term syntactic structures demonstrably support the recall of serial order information in verbal WM.
• This supports hybrid and full linguistic accounts of verbal WM.
• The study provides the first evidence for syntactic knowledge's contribution to serial order recall in verbal WM across different languages.