Phonological similarity as an index of short-term memory precision in monolingual and trilingual speakers

Phonological similarity as an index of

short-term memory precision in

monolingual and trilingual speakers

M. Bouffier & S. Majerus

Conference on Multilingualism (COM)

16-18/12/2018

Introduction

Short-term memory (STM)

 Often defined in terms of capacity (Miller, 1956; Cowan, 2010)

Limited number of items one is capable of recalling

 Binary measure STM performance

Item recalled or forgotten

2

Introduction

STM precision

 Resolution of representations in STM (Joseph et al., 2015)

 Memory trace degraded, but not fully erased

 Quality rather than quantity of representations (Ma et al., 2014)

 Flexible resource allocation (Ma et al., 2014)

 Mainly studied in the visuo-spatial domain (Bays et al., 2009;

Zokaei et al., 2011; Burnett Heyes et al., 2012; Klyszejko et al., 2014)

 Less in the auditory-verbal domain (Joseph et al., 2015; Gilbert et

al., 2017; Clark et al., 2017) 3

Introduction

Use of a phonological similarity gradient between memory and probe items

 In monolinguals (Study 1)

 In trilinguals (Study 2)

Hypotheses

 More errors with increased similarity

 Performance impacted by language proficiency

Interdependence between language and verbal STM

 Interindividual differences

Study 1

 Phonological similarity for French words

 Probe recognition task

 Participants

 60 French-speaking participants (30 women)

 18-30 years ( = 22.63; = 2.840)

 No neurological disorder or learning disability

5

Study 1: Methods

 Accuracy (correct rejection+ hits) 7

Study 1: Resutls

Study 1: Results

 Individual differences and Precision scores

-3,5 -2,5 -1,5 -0,5 0,5 1,5 2,5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 d' Participant ID

Diff d' (high-low similarity)

-3,5 -2,5 -1,5 -0,5 0,5 1,5 2,5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 d' Participant ID

Diff d' (moderate-low similarity)

Interim summary

 Effect of similarity gradient

 Interindividual variability

 What about precision for L2 and L3?

 Varying language representations

 Depending on language proficiency

Study 2: Methods

 Participants:

 35 Belgian German speakers (18 women)

 18-30 years ( = 22.11; = 3.35)

 Same task…

…in German (L1), French (L2) and English (L3)

 Evaluation of receptive (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) and productive

vocabulary (Bonin et al., 2003)

 Three testing sessions

10

Study 2: Methods

11

L1

L3

Study 2: Results

Interaction Language * Condition

12 0,7 0,75 0,8 0,85 0,9 0,95 1

Dissimilar Moderately similar Highly similar

A cc ur ac y (Correct reject io ns )

Study 2: Results

Correlation between L2 and L3 mean accuracy and L2 and L3 proficiency 13 0,6 0,65 0,7 0,75 0,8 0,85 0,9 0,95 1 -2 -1,5 -1 -0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 M ean a c c uracy in French a nd Eng lish

Proficiency in French and English R = 0.626

Study 2: Results

Interindividual variability and precision scores

14 -3 -2,5 -2 -1,5 -1 -0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 D' Participant ID German

Diff d' (high-low similarity)

-3 -2,5 -2 -1,5 -1 -0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 D' Participant ID French

Diff d' (high-low similarity)

-3 -2,5 -2 -1,5 -1 -0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 D' Participant ID English

Diff d' (high-low similarity)

Mean: -0.52

Study 2: Results

ENG Diff d' (high-low

similarity) -0.043 0.012

* BF₁₀ > 10, ** BF₁₀ > 30, *** BF₁₀ > 100

15

General discussion and conclusion

 Observed gradients

 Phonological similarity

 Language

 Correlations with L2 and L3 proficiency

 Interindividual variability

 Correlation between precision scores?

General discussion and conclusion

 Sensitive measure of STM performance

 Interdependence between language system and verbal

STM (Baddeley et al., 1998; Cowan, 1999; Burgess & Hitch, 2006; Majerus, 2010;

Majerus, 2013) 17

Merci für die attention!

Backslides

Introduction

Some studies already conducted

20

Introduction

Main results

Load effect (Zokaei et al., 2011; Joseph et al., 2015; Clark et al., 2018)

Recency effect (Zokaei et al., 201; Burnett Heyes et al., 2012; Joseph et al., 2015)

Study 2: Results

German: Interaction Condition * Position

22 0,6 0,65 0,7 0,75 0,8 0,85 0,9 0,95 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 A cc ur ac y (co rrect reject io ns ) Position Dissimilar Moderately similar Highly similar BF_Interaction: 0.043 BF_Condition: 3.157e +8

Study 2: Results

23

French: Interaction Condition * Position

0,6 0,65 0,7 0,75 0,8 0,85 0,9 0,95 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 A cc ur ac y (co rrect reject io ns ) Position Dissimilar Moderately similar

Highly similar BFCondition: 6.005e +15

Study 2: Results

English: Interaction Condition * Position

24 0,6 0,65 0,7 0,75 0,8 0,85 0,9 0,95 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 A cc ur ac y (co rrect reject io ns ) Position Dissimilar Moderately similar