Phonological short-term memory and language learning in different populations

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Three themes are proposed. The first one concerns the relationship between phonological short-term memory and learning of new language. The proposed research aims to add to our understanding of the data relating the ability to immediately repeat back relatively meaningless verbal material, for instance, digits or pronounceable pseudowords, with first language acquisition, normal progress in learning to read, and successful learning of a foreign-language. Such findings led Baddeley, Gathercole and Papagno (1998) to propose that the type of memory tapped by these tasks constitutes a language learning system. The explanation states that phonological short-term memory forms a gateway to long-term storage of language material. We explore here an alternative hypothesis that phonological short-term memory tasks provide us with a snapshot of the learning process, and that a fundamental ability underlying language learning is that of encoding well-specified phonological traces that survive the high-interference conditions in short-term memory tasks. The second theme concerns the character of phonological working memory representations and their interaction with phonological long-term knowledge. This theme is investigated in traditional list learning experiments that tap the importance of different language information (on the level of sensory features, phonology, morphology and prosody) for later retrieval. A final theme addresses the language learning process itself by attempting to develop brain measures that mark different types of learning. These are used to characterise language learning over the life span. The aim is to investigate age-dependent qualitative differences in language-learning processes. In the future, such knowledge can be used to develop better-suited teaching methods for target groups.