Syntactic and semantic influences on verbal short-term memory
Although semantic influences on verbal short-term memory
(STM) performance are well-established, substantially
less research has studied the influence of syntactic representation.
In the present study, syntactic and semantic
factors were manipulated in order to explore how both
interact to influence verbal STM. Subjects performed
immediate, serial recall on lists of six Dutch words composed
of three sets of adjective-noun pairs, where the
nouns were either common (‘de’) or neuter (‘het’) gender.
The grammaticality of the word pairs was manipulated
through the morphological agreement between the
adjectives and nouns (either legal of illegal), and the
semantics by creating more or less meaningful word pairs
(e.g., big bucket vs. grateful bucket). Syntactic and semantic
factors were fully crossed within-subjects and
within-items yielding a 2 (Grammatical) X 2 (Meaningful)
X 2 (Noun Gender) design. Results on serial order memory
accuracy revealed that both grammaticality and meaningfulness
improved performance, and that the factors
interacted, such that the beneficial effects of grammaticality
were only present for lists of meaningful items. The
present results thus demonstrate that while something as
simple as morphological agreement (a long-term, syntactic
constraint) can improve verbal STM performance, it only seem to do so in the presence stronger semantic
constraints.
Publication type
PosterPublication date
2011
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