The impact of syntactic knowledge on item and serial order recall in WM
Creators: name: Attout, Lucie
name: Majerus, Steve
name: Querella, Pauline
name: Schweppe, Judith
name: Xiao, Hong
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: Serial order working memory (WM) is crucial to our daily life, as it allows for structured encoding and maintenance of the sequential order of events and stimuli. This project examines the hypothesis that linguistic sequential knowledge supports the coding of serial order information in verbal WM, by examining the impact of syntactic knowledge about word order on immediate serial recall of word lists. A number of studies have shown that short-term serial recall of a word sequence is better when the words form a syntactically coherent sentence. Perham et al. (2009) observed better recall performance for grammatical, i.e., syntactically correct (adjective-noun) sequences than for ungrammatical (noun-adjective) sequences in the English language. However, the authors did not distinguish recall of item from serial order information and hence there is no direct evidence that syntactic knowledge would support serial order coding in WM. Schweppe et al. (2022) examined the same effect for adjective-noun and noun-adjective sequences in German, by distinguishing between item and serial order aspects of WM. While observing a general impact on recall performance, with an advantage for the syntactically coherent adjective-noun sequences, they did not observe a specific impact on order recall errors. Recently, Querella and Majerus (in preparation) tested this syntactic regularity effect on adjective-noun and noun-adjective pairs in French, the advantage of French language stimuli being that adjective-noun and noun-adjective sequences can be both syntactically coherent, depending on the type of adjective. This allowed to fully cross adjective-noun order and syntactic regularity. But still, as in the study by Schweppe et al., no effect of syntactic regularity on specific order recall estimates were observed. One reason for this paradoxical finding of sequential linguistic knowledge impacting item but not serial order aspects of WM may be that in both the Schweppe et al. and Querella and Majerus’ studies, all adjective noun pairs within a given list were presented in the same order (i.e., either all adjective-noun or all noun-adjective). This redundant within-list arrangement of adjective/noun sequences may have led to serial order expectancy effects and reduced the probability of order errors to occur. The present study aims at re-exploring the impact of adjective-noun syntactic order knowledge on serial order WM by minimizing any expectancies about the positions in which an adjective/noun will occur within a given list. We will present lists of 6 words made of 3 adjective/noun pairs for immediate serial recall, with each list mixing adjective/noun (each list will contain one adjective-noun and two noun-adjective pairs, or two adjective-noun and one noun-adjective pairs). In a given list, all pairs will be in their syntactically preferred order, or all pairs will be in a syntactically non-preferred order.