What does it mean by representation limits in terms of WM?
Limits on input and output, only so much you can take in -in terms of sensory inputs (touch, feel hear)
What is the Phonological Loop?
It represents a brief store of mainly verbal information together with a rehearsal mechanism.
What is the main evidence for the phonological loop?
- Phonological Similarity Effect
- Articulate Suppression
What factors influence capacity of WM?
Information: variety, input modality, familiarity
Sensory-specific memories, long term memory
What is the phonological similarity effect?
- Give a sequence of letters sounding similar or different to eachother - easier to remember dissimilar sounding sequence
- Memory code is phonological (based on the sound of the letters
- Due to ability to rehearse speech inside your head, more confused rehearsing similar sounding letters
What is articulatory suppression?
Asks people to repeat an irrelevant word over again whilst trying to remember a sequence of words
- Generating irrelevant speech leads to poorer results
- Moreover linked with speech output
What did Conrad (1964) Evidence?
Acoustic Coding:
- Made a table looking at combinations and pairs of letters
- Made a confusion matrix, how likely pairing letters will be confusing
- Higher number more likely to make an error
- If they sound similar they don’t remember them as well
What did Baddeley (1966) evidence?
Phonological similarity effects at short delays, semantic similarity effects at long delays
Long delay don’t get sound based evidence, you get semantic effects - words with similar meanings you get confusions at long delays
What is Crowder’s (1972) suffix effect?
Presented a sequence of words then heard a buzzer or word they had to ignore
- Heard a buzzer performance was unaffected
- Speech suffix (irrelevant word) - massively impaired as few items in the list
- NOT just any sound but a speech sound effects performance
Word Length Effect
Short word list is easier than the list of long words even though there is the same number of words
What does speech rate correlate with
memory span
Faster speech means larger memory capacity
How is the phonological loop required for learning vocabulary?
If you learn a new word you had to remember the sound sequence
You need the ability to rehearse verbal sequences to like with the ability to repeat new words
What does the word length effect tell us about how
information is lost from the phonological store and
how it is maintained in the store?
Memory system relies on subvocal rehearsal and can retain about 2 seconds of speech
Faster you rehearse the more you can remember
How does Articulatory suppression affect visual and verbal presentation of sequences differently?
For visual presentation: (repeating an irrelevant word) removes word length and phonological similarity effects
For auditory: removes word length effect but not phonological similarity
How is verbal short-term memory affected by visual presentation compared with auditory presentation of word sequences to remember?
Visual: Subvocal rehearsal is used to translate visual input into a phonological code
Auditory: Auditory input is direct to phonological store, but subvocal
rehearsal is needed for the word length effect
Dumb version: Because you are hearing them there is no need for sound base code as this is already done, but because the word length effect is about rehearsal inside your head you can’t do that under auditory suppression
Explain in simple terms the relationship between sound , the phonological store and inner speech
Sound goes directly into the system as it is a sound based code
Inner speech process able to hold 2 seconds of speech
Who first investigated the effect of irrelevant speech on the phonological loop?
Salamé and Baddeley (1982)
What is the irrelevant speech effect?
- Immediate, verbal serial recall is disrupted by Irrelevant Speech
- Irrelevant Speech effect is greater for phonologically similar speech
E.g. remember visual digit sequence 3-9-6-5-1-8-4
while hearing: sore tee thrive heaven fix wine gate
*Under what condition is the irrelevant speech effect not apparent at all?
20 What could influence it to disappear?
1) Effect does not appear with continuous white noise
- Speech specific effect with direct access to phonological store
2) Effect disappears with articulatory suppression
What concepts does the irrelevant speech effect back?
The phonological store plus speech based
rehearsal system
Discuss briefly the concept of the phonological loop
- Thought to hold about 2 seconds worth of speech
- Thought to be affected by decay over time unless prevented by rehearsal
- Is disrupted by articulatory suppression and by irrelevant speech
What is the role of the phonological loop in learning a language?
Short-term verbal memory impairments -impairments in vocabulary learning. If you can remember things in the correct order you wont be able to remember words.
Articulatory suppression impairs vocabulary learning
Non-word repetition predicts vocabulary in young children
Poor functioning of phonological loop in
children with language difficulties
In healthy adults articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech ……
reduce recall for visually and aurally presented material – do not wipe it out (e.g. Chen & Cowan, 2009)
Where are items stored in the articulatory suppression condition if not in the phonological loop?
- Possible of semantic loop and visual codes
- Activated long term memory with focus of attention
