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Related Experiment Videos

Phonotactic influences on short-term memory

S E Gathercole1, C R Frankish, S J Pickering

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Bristol, England. sue.gathercole@bristol.ac.uk

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|February 9, 1999
PubMed
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Phonotactic probabilities aid serial recall by reconstructing memory traces. Both real words and high-probability nonwords improve recall accuracy in children.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Phonotactic probabilities, the likelihood of sound sequences in a language, influence speech perception and production.
  • Understanding how these probabilities affect memory, particularly phonological short-term memory, is crucial for cognitive models.
  • Previous research suggests lexical knowledge aids recall, but the role of phonotactic probability in nonwords is less clear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of phonotactic probabilities on serial recall performance in children.
  • To determine if phonotactic frequency influences the recall of nonwords and real words.
  • To explore the mechanisms by which lexicality and phonotactic knowledge aid memory reconstruction.

Main Methods:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Experiments involving 7 and 8-year-old children performing serial recall tasks.
  • Utilizing monosyllabic words and nonwords manipulated for phonotactic frequencies (high vs. low).
  • Analyzing recall accuracy for full vs. partial recall and the influence of syllable frequency versus biphone frequency.

    • Main Results:

    • A recall advantage for words over nonwords persisted even when phonotactic probabilities were balanced.
    • Nonword recall accuracy was significantly better for high-probability nonwords compared to low-probability nonwords.
    • The effect of nonword frequency was attributed to the frequency of constituent syllables, not biphones.
    • Both lexicality and high phonotactic frequency increased the proportion of full recalls.

    Conclusions:

    • Phonotactic knowledge, similar to lexical knowledge, can be used to reconstruct degraded memory traces in phonological short-term memory.
    • These findings support models where phonological short-term memory is not a passive store but an active system utilizing linguistic knowledge.
    • The study highlights the importance of phonotactic regularities in children's memory for speech sequences.