A Linguistically Constrained Model of Short-Term Memory for Nonwords ☆

Abstract Errors in the repetition and serial recall of nonwords indicate that structural properties of the syllable are represented in short-term memory. We develop a connectionist model of short-term memory for such unfamiliar phonological sequences, based on insights from existing models of speech production and short-term memory. The results of simulations of experiments involving nonword recall and repetition are presented, and the mechanisms which produce the common error types are discussed. We also show how the proposed model can be extended to develop and make use of long-term representations of phonological forms, and how a global reduction in short-term memory capacity (such as is commonly observed in developmental dyslexia, and acquired disorders of output phonology) could differentially affect performance on tasks involving familiar and unfamiliar materials.

[1]  K. Lashley.  The problem of serial order in behavior , 1951 .

[2]  A. Baddeley,et al.  The Psychology of Learning and Motivation , 1974 .

[3]  P. Mermelstein.  Automatic segmentation of speech into syllabic units. , 1975, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[4]  M. Chi.  Short-term memory limitations in children: Capacity or processing deficits? , 1976, Memory & cognition.

[5]  R. Logie,et al.  Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words , 1980 .

[6]  W. Cooper,et al.  Sentence Processing: Psycholinguistic Studies Presented to Merrill Garrett. , 1980 .

[7]  Andrew W. Ellis,et al.  Errors in speech and short-term memory: The effects of phonemic similarity and syllable position , 1980 .

[8]  S. M. Marcus.  Acoustic determinants of perceptual center (P-center) location , 1981, Perception & psychophysics.

[9]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  Simulating a Skilled Typist: A Study of Skilled Cognitive-Motor Performance , 1982, Cogn. Sci..

[10]  V. Mann,et al.  Speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability. , 1983, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[11]  G. Hitch.  Working memory , 1984, Psychological Medicine.

[12]  R. Campbell,et al.  Phonological Dyslexia and Dysgraphia in a Highly Literate Subject: A Developmental Case with Associated Deficits of Phonemic Processing and Awareness , 1985, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[13]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Learning internal representations by error propagation , 1986 .

[14]  R. Treiman.  The division between onsets and rimes in English syllables , 1986 .

[15]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[16]  R Treiman,et al.  Short-term memory errors for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  The retrieval of phonological forms in production: tests of predictions from a connectionist model , 1988 .

[18]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Evaluation of the role of phonological STM in the development of vocabulary in children: A longitudinal study , 1989 .

[19]  G. Denes,et al.  Impairment in Processing Meaningless Verbal Material in Several Modalities: The Relationship between Short-term Memory and Phonological Skills , 1989, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[20]  George Houghton,et al.  The problem of serial order: a neural network model of sequence learning and recall , 1990 .

[21]  A. Meyer.  The time course of phonological encoding in language production: Phonological encoding inside a syllable , 1991 .

[22]  A. Baddeley,et al.  The influences of number of syllables and wordlikeness on children’s repetition of nonwords , 1991, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[23]  Gordon D. A. Brown,et al.  Memory for familiar and unfamiliar words: Evidence for a long-term memory contribution to short-term memory span , 1991 .

[24]  Charles Hulme,et al.  Deficits in output phonology: an explanation of reading failure? Cognit , 1992 .

[25]  N. Burgess,et al.  Toward a network model of the articulatory loop , 1992, Connectionist psychology: A text with readings.

[26]  Peter Howell,et al.  Perceptual centers in speech: An acoustic analysis , 1992 .

[27]  Andrew Hunt,et al.  Recurrent neural networks for syllabification , 1993, Speech Commun..

[28]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  Structure and Content in Language Production: A Theory of Frame Constraints in Phonological Speech Errors , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[29]  Susan E. Gathercole,et al.  Phonological working memory in very young children , 1993 .

[30]  U. Goswami,et al.  Phonological Skills and Learning to Read , 1993, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[31]  J. Hodges,et al.  The Impact of Semantic Memory Loss on Phonological Representations , 1994, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[32]  G. Dell,et al.  Origins of Paraphasias in Deep Dysphasia: Testing the Consequences of a Decay Impairment to an Interactive Spreading Activation Model of Lexical Retrieval , 1994, Brain and Language.

[33]  Rebecca Treiman,et al.  Syllabification of Bisyllabic Nonwords: Evidence from Short-Term Memory Errors , 1994, Language and speech.

[34]  Neil Burgess,et al.  A solvable connectionist model of immediate recall of ordered lists , 1994, NIPS.

[35]  George Houghton,et al.  Parallel Models of Serial Behaviour: Lashley Revisited , 1995 .

[36]  R Treiman.  Errors in short-term memory for speech: a developmental study. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[37]  Michael I. Jordan.  Serial Order: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach , 1997 .