Mann, W.

Marshall, C. R.

Morgan, G.

Frontiers in Psychology

English

PubMed

Chloë R. Marshall

Wolfgang Mann

Gary Morgan

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Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a 
disadvantage for serial recall
Chloë R. Marshall1,2*, Wolfgang Mann1,2 and Gary Morgan1,2
1 Department of Language and Communication Science, City University London, London, UK
2 Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, London, UK
*Correspondence: chloe.marshall.1@city.ac.uk
A commentary on
Looking for an explanation for low sign 
span: is order involved?
by Gozzi, M., Geraci, C., Cecchetto, C., 
Perugini, M., and Papagno, C. (2010). J. Deaf 
Stud. Deaf Educ. 16, 101–107.
“Working memory, deafness and sign lan-
guage,” in The Handbook of Deaf Studies, 
Language and Education
by Hall, M., and Bavelier, D. (2010). 458–472.
The higher short-term memory (STM) 
capacity for spoken language compared 
to signed language is well-documented: 
speakers have a digit span of 7 ± 2, signers 
only 5 ± 1 (see Hall and Bavelier, 2010, for 
a review). A consensus has been developing 
that speech is “special” in supporting the 
temporal sequencing of linguistic informa-
tion, giving spoken-language users a serial 
recall advantage (e.g., Bavelier et al., 2008; 
Conway et al., 2009). The “speech supports 
temporal sequencing” hypothesis predicts 
that the difference between signed and spo-
ken languages should disappear in tasks that 
do not require recall of a sequence of signs. 
However, recent data from a non-sign rep-
etition task do not support this prediction.
We created a sign language equivalent of 
the non-word repetition task, a task widely 
used to investigate phonological STM in 
speakers. Test items were phonotactically 
plausible but meaningless signs, manipu-
lated for complexity of handshape and 
movement (Mann et al., 2010). Importantly, 
serial recall was not involved in this task. At 
most, a non-sign contained a change from 
one handshape to another or from one loca-
tion to another (or both). We tested 91 deaf 
children aged 3–11 years, divided into three 
age-bands. All had early and continued reg-
ular exposure to BSL, comprehension skills 
within the normal range (as measured by 
the BSL Receptive Skills Test; Herman et al., 
1999), normal nonverbal cognitive develop-
ment and no identified special educational 
need additional to deafness. The task proved 
to be surprisingly difficult, with low scores 
across the age groups in comparison to 
results from non-word repetition studies 
of hearing, English-speaking children of 
equivalent ages, including those for whom 
English is an additional language (Figure 1).
Generally, signs are of longer average 
duration than words, so we measured the 
duration of a selection of 3 and 4 syllable 
non-words used in a new non-word repeti-
tion study (Marshall et al., 2011). Duration 
for non-words ranged from 0.97 to 1.36 s 
and non-signs were slightly longer, with a 
mean duration of 1.31 s for phonologically 
simple and 1.35 s for phonologically com-
plex non-signs (overall range 1–1.84 s). Is 
it possible that non-signs are more difficult 
to repeat because of these differences in 
temporal duration? After all, hearing chil-
dren are less successful at repeating longer 
non-words (for a review, see Gathercole, 
2006). For hearing children, STM capacity 
increases rapidly throughout childhood, and 
at the age of 3 years it is already equal to 
about 3 digits (Chi, 1977). Yet, in non-sign 
and non-word repetition tasks, stimuli are 
presented singly and not in a span, so there 
is no new material to block rehearsal, and 
our stimuli do not exceed the estimated 2 s 
of available time capacity in STM (Baddeley 
et al., 1975). Rather than duration, we argue 
that the way in which phonological material 
is structured is likely to be a more important 
limiting factor in repetition.
The “speech supports temporal pro-
cessing” view has recently been modified 
by Hall and Bavelier (2010), who argue 
that the advantage for speech arises from 
speakers being more likely to rely on the 
temporal chunking of units and on articu-
latory rehearsal. Under this more nuanced 
view, they might predict that the repetition 
of non-signs would be disadvantaged rela-
tive to the repetition of non-words because 
the latter benefit from the chunking of tem-
porally adjacent units. However, in a direct 
comparison between serial recall and non-
word repetition Archibald and Gathercole 
Figure 1 | Comparison between performance on the non-sign repetition test and studies of 
non-word repetition in english. Bars show SD.  Non-sign repetition, Mann et al., 2010;  Non-word 
repetition, native English speakers; • At age 3–5 years: Roy and Chiat, 2004. Age: 3 years; • At age 
6–8 years: Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990. Age: 6–7; • At age 9–11 years: Archibald and Gathercole, 2006. 
Age: 7–11, mean 9;  Non-word repetition, children with English as an additional language; • At age 
9–11 years: Kohnert et al., 2006. Age: 7–13, mean 9.
www.frontiersin.org May 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 102 | 1
General Commentary
published: 18 May 2011
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102
Conway, C., Pisoni, D., and Kronenberger, W. (2009). 
The importance of sound for cognitive sequencing 
abilities: the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. Curr. 
Dir. Psychol. Sci. 18, 275–279.
Gathercole, S. (2006). Non-word repetition and learning: 
the nature of the relationship. Appl. Psycholinguist. 
27, 513–543.
Gathercole, S., and Baddeley, A. (1990). Phonological 
memory deficits in language disordered children: 
is there a causal connection? J. Mem. Lang. 29, 
336–360.
Gozzi, M., Geraci, C., Cecchetto, C., Perugini, M., and 
Papagno, C. (2011). Looking for an explanation for 
low sign span: is order involved? J. Deaf Stud. Deaf 
Educ. 16, 101–107.
Hall, M., and Bavelier, D. (2010). “Working memory, 
deafness and sign language,” in The Handbook of 
Deaf Studies, Language and Education, Vol. 2, eds 
M. Marschark and P. E. Spencer (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press), 458–472.
Herman, R., Holmes, S., and Woll, B. (1999). Assessing 
British Sign Language Development: Receptive Skills 
Test. Gloucestershire: Forest Bookshop.
Kohnert, K., Windsor, J., and Yim, D. (2006). Do language-
based processing tasks separate children with primary 
language impairment from typical bilinguals? Learn. 
Disabil. Res. Pract. 21, 19–29.
Mann, W., Marshall, C. R., Mason, K., and Morgan, G. 
(2010). The acquisition of sign language: the impact 
of phonetic complexity on phonology. Lang. Learn. 
Dev. 6, 60–86.
Marshall, C. R., Payne, H., and Williams, D. (2011). 
“Non-word repetition as a tool for investigating dis-
orders that are comorbid with SLI,” in European Child 
Language Disorders Workshop, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Orfanidou, E., Adam, R., Morgan, G., and McQueen, J. M. 
(2010). Segmentation in signed and spoken language: 
different modalities, same segmentation procedures. 
J. Mem. Lang. 62, 272–283.
Roy, P., and Chiat, S. (2004). A prosodically controlled 
word and nonword repetition task for 2-to 4-year-
olds: evidence from typically developing children. J. 
Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 47, 223–234.
Sandler, W. (2008). “The syllable in sign language: con-
sidering the other natural language modality,” in 
Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Syllable Organization, 
Festschrift in Honor of Peter MacNeilage, eds B. Davis 
and K. Zajdo (New York: Taylor Francis), 379–408.
Received: 21 December 2010; accepted: 09 May 2011; pub-
lished online: 18 May 2011.
Citation: Marshall CR, Mann W and Morgan G (2011) 
Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a dis-
advantage for serial recall. Front. Psychology 2:102. doi: 
10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102
This article was submitted to Frontiers in Language 
Sciences, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
Copyright © 2011 Marshall, Mann and Morgan. This is an 
open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between 
the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, 
distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the 
original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers 
conditions are complied with.
We speculate that these differences in 
structural organization between signed 
and spoken phonology mean that signers, 
when faced with an unfamiliar sign, have 
to monitor a larger repertoire of parameter 
values and parameter combinations. One 
way of construing “phonological heaviness” 
is in terms of there being more “degrees of 
freedom” in the phonological composition 
of a sign. Having fewer limits on what to 
expect in terms of the linguistic input’s pho-
nological form imposes a greater STM load. 
Thinking in terms of “degrees of freedom” 
also makes predictions for non-word repeti-
tion in spoken languages. Speakers of lan-
guages with larger inventories of segments, 
syllable types, and metrical patterns (and 
therefore arguably less predictability in 
terms of how segments are sequenced and 
where stress falls) might repeat non-words 
less accurately than speakers of languages 
with smaller inventories, all other charac-
teristics (e.g., syllable number) being equal.
The “degrees of freedom” hypothesis 
needs fleshing out, but it has promise in 
helping us to understand why modality dif-
ferences in STM exist, and why STM deals 
particularly effectively with speech.
Acknowledgments
Chloë R. Marshall is funded by a Leverhulme 
Trust Early Career Fellowship, Wolfgang 
Mann by a City University London Research 
Fellowship, and Gary Morgan by the 
Economic and Social Research Council of 
Great Britain (Grant 620-28-600 Deafness, 
Cognition and Language Research Centre).
RefeRences
Archibald, L., and Gathercole, S. (2006). Non-word rep-
etition: a comparison of tests. J. Speech Lang. Hear. 
Res. 49, 970–983.
Archibald, L., and Gathercole, S. (2007). Non-word rep-
etition in specific language impairment: more than 
a phonological short-term memory deficit. Psychon. 
Bull. Rev. 14, 919–924.
Baddeley, A., Thomson, N., and Buchanan, M. (1975). 
Word length and the structure of short term memory. 
J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 14, 575–589.
Bavelier, D., Newport, E., Hall, M., Supalla, T. S., and 
Boutla, M. (2008). Ordered short-term memory dif-
fers in signers and speakers: implications for models 
of short-term memory. Cognition 107, 433–459.
Chi, M. (1977). Age differences in memory span. J. Exp. 
Child. Psychol. 23, 226–281.
(2007) found that there was a role for pho-
nology in explaining individual differences 
in non-word repetition accuracy above and 
beyond the impact of serial recall. We sug-
gest therefore that STM differences between 
signed and spoken languages are not due 
solely to the advantages offered by temporal 
chunking, but also to differences in phono-
logical structure. Here we speculate as to 
what those differences might be.
Gozzi et al. (2011) propose a “same 
store, bigger units” explanation, according 
to which “signs are ultimately more difficult 
to retain because they are phonologically 
heavier than words” (p. 6). They suggest that 
signed material is “heavier” because even 
the simplest syllable requires the signer to 
process information about the four forma-
tional parameters of a sign, namely hand-
shape, orientation, movement, and location. 
In contrast, they argue, a spoken-language 
syllable can consist of just a single vowel (for 
example, the spoken forms of the English 
words “eye” and “oh!”).
That may be the case, but in non-words 
the amount of phonological material to be 
remembered is considerably larger than just 
a vowel. However, there are formational 
constraints on the construction of spoken 
syllables: from the inventory of sounds that 
a language allows its words to be built from, 
only a subset of those sounds can occur 
in word-initial, middle, and final posi-
tions. In contrast, it is not clear that there 
are equivalent limits on the permutations 
of handshape, orientation, movement and 
location within signs. While there are well-
formedness constraints on signs in terms 
of how many parameters can be combined 
(e.g., one specified handshape or location 
change) there do not appear to be restric-
tions, for example, on which handshapes can 
occur with which locations (Orfanidou et al., 
2010). As a result, signers have to be prepared 
to encounter many possible combinations of 
each formational parameter while processing 
novel signs, rather than following predictive 
routes. Furthermore, with respect to the pho-
nological features that make up phonemes 
and sign parameters, signed languages have 
arguably around twice as many features as 
spoken languages (Sandler, 2008).
Marshall et al. Short-term memory in signed languages
Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences  May 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 102 | 2


Short-Term Memory in Signed Languages: Not Just a Disadvantage for Serial Recall

Marshall, Chloe

Mann, Wolfgang

Morgan, Gary

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Short term memory in signed languages : not just a disadvantage for serial recall

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Wolfgang eMann

Gary eMorgan

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Short-term memory in signed languages: Not just a disadvantage for serial recall

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Marshall, Chloë R.

Roehampton University Research Repository

Short-Term Memory in Signed Languages::Not Just a Disadvantage for Serial Recall

City Research Online

Marshall, C. R., Mann, W. & Morgan, G. (2011). Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a disadvantage for serial recall. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 102 . doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102 <http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102>City Research OnlineOriginal citation: Marshall, C. R., Mann, W. & Morgan, G. (2011). Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a disadvantage for serial recall. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 102 . doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102 <http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102>Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/361/ Copyright & reuseCity  University  London has developed City  Research Online  so that  its  users  may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders. Users may download and/ or print one  copy  of  any  article(s)  in  City  Research  Online  to  facilitate  their  private  study  or  for  non-commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of researchThe version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper.EnquiriesIf you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact  with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at publications@city.ac.uk.Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a disadvantage for serial recallChloë R. Marshall1,2*, Wolfgang Mann1,2 and Gary Morgan1,21 Department of Language and Communication Science, City University London, London, UK2 Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, London, UK*Correspondence: chloe.marshall.1@city.ac.ukA commentary onLooking for an explanation for low sign span: is order involved?by Gozzi, M., Geraci, C., Cecchetto, C., Perugini, M., and Papagno, C. (2010). J. Deaf Stud. Deaf Educ. 16, 101–107.“Working memory, deafness and sign lan-guage,” in The Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Educationby Hall, M., and Bavelier, D. (2010). 458–472.The higher short-term memory (STM) capacity for spoken language compared to signed language is well-documented: speakers have a digit span of 7 ± 2, signers only 5 ± 1 (see Hall and Bavelier, 2010, for a review). A consensus has been developing that speech is “special” in supporting the temporal sequencing of linguistic informa-tion, giving spoken-language users a serial recall advantage (e.g., Bavelier et al., 2008; Conway et al., 2009). The “speech supports temporal sequencing” hypothesis predicts that the difference between signed and spo-ken languages should disappear in tasks that do not require recall of a sequence of signs. However, recent data from a non-sign rep-etition task do not support this prediction.We created a sign language equivalent of the non-word repetition task, a task widely used to investigate phonological STM in speakers. Test items were phonotactically plausible but meaningless signs, manipu-lated for complexity of handshape and movement (Mann et al., 2010). Importantly, serial recall was not involved in this task. At most, a non-sign contained a change from one handshape to another or from one loca-tion to another (or both). We tested 91 deaf children aged 3–11 years, divided into three age-bands. All had early and continued reg-ular exposure to BSL, comprehension skills within the normal range (as measured by the BSL Receptive Skills Test; Herman et al., 1999), normal nonverbal cognitive develop-ment and no identified special educational need additional to deafness. The task proved to be surprisingly difficult, with low scores across the age groups in comparison to results from non-word repetition studies of hearing, English-speaking children of equivalent ages, including those for whom English is an additional language (Figure 1).Generally, signs are of longer average duration than words, so we measured the duration of a selection of 3 and 4 syllable non-words used in a new non-word repeti-tion study (Marshall et al., 2011). Duration for non-words ranged from 0.97 to 1.36 s and non-signs were slightly longer, with a mean duration of 1.31 s for phonologically simple and 1.35 s for phonologically com-plex non-signs (overall range 1–1.84 s). Is it possible that non-signs are more difficult to repeat because of these differences in temporal duration? After all, hearing chil-dren are less successful at repeating longer non-words (for a review, see Gathercole, 2006). For hearing children, STM capacity increases rapidly throughout childhood, and at the age of 3 years it is already equal to about 3 digits (Chi, 1977). Yet, in non-sign and non-word repetition tasks, stimuli are presented singly and not in a span, so there is no new material to block rehearsal, and our stimuli do not exceed the estimated 2 s of available time capacity in STM (Baddeley et al., 1975). Rather than duration, we argue that the way in which phonological material is structured is likely to be a more important limiting factor in repetition.The “speech supports temporal pro-cessing” view has recently been modified by Hall and Bavelier (2010), who argue that the advantage for speech arises from speakers being more likely to rely on the temporal chunking of units and on articu-latory rehearsal. Under this more nuanced view, they might predict that the repetition of non-signs would be disadvantaged rela-tive to the repetition of non-words because the latter benefit from the chunking of tem-porally adjacent units. However, in a direct comparison between serial recall and non-word repetition Archibald and Gathercole Figure 1 | Comparison between performance on the non-sign repetition test and studies of non-word repetition in english. Bars show SD.  Non-sign repetition, Mann et al., 2010;  Non-word repetition, native English speakers; • At age 3–5 years: Roy and Chiat, 2004. Age: 3 years; • At age 6–8 years: Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990. Age: 6–7; • At age 9–11 years: Archibald and Gathercole, 2006. Age: 7–11, mean 9;  Non-word repetition, children with English as an additional language; • At age 9–11 years: Kohnert et al., 2006. Age: 7–13, mean 9.www.frontiersin.org May 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 102 | 1General Commentarypublished: 18 May 2011doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102Conway, C., Pisoni, D., and Kronenberger, W. (2009). The importance of sound for cognitive sequencing abilities: the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 18, 275–279.Gathercole, S. (2006). Non-word repetition and learning: the nature of the relationship. Appl. Psycholinguist. 27, 513–543.Gathercole, S., and Baddeley, A. (1990). Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: is there a causal connection? J. Mem. Lang. 29, 336–360.Gozzi, M., Geraci, C., Cecchetto, C., Perugini, M., and Papagno, C. (2011). Looking for an explanation for low sign span: is order involved? J. Deaf Stud. Deaf Educ. 16, 101–107.Hall, M., and Bavelier, D. (2010). “Working memory, deafness and sign language,” in The Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education, Vol. 2, eds M. Marschark and P. E. Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 458–472.Herman, R., Holmes, S., and Woll, B. (1999). Assessing British Sign Language Development: Receptive Skills Test. Gloucestershire: Forest Bookshop.Kohnert, K., Windsor, J., and Yim, D. (2006). Do language-based processing tasks separate children with primary language impairment from typical bilinguals? Learn. Disabil. Res. Pract. 21, 19–29.Mann, W., Marshall, C. R., Mason, K., and Morgan, G. (2010). The acquisition of sign language: the impact of phonetic complexity on phonology. Lang. Learn. Dev. 6, 60–86.Marshall, C. R., Payne, H., and Williams, D. (2011). “Non-word repetition as a tool for investigating dis-orders that are comorbid with SLI,” in European Child Language Disorders Workshop, Thessaloniki, Greece.Orfanidou, E., Adam, R., Morgan, G., and McQueen, J. M. (2010). Segmentation in signed and spoken language: different modalities, same segmentation procedures. J. Mem. Lang. 62, 272–283.Roy, P., and Chiat, S. (2004). A prosodically controlled word and nonword repetition task for 2-to 4-year-olds: evidence from typically developing children. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 47, 223–234.Sandler, W. (2008). “The syllable in sign language: con-sidering the other natural language modality,” in Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Syllable Organization, Festschrift in Honor of Peter MacNeilage, eds B. Davis and K. Zajdo (New York: Taylor Francis), 379–408.Received: 21 December 2010; accepted: 09 May 2011; pub-lished online: 18 May 2011.Citation: Marshall CR, Mann W and Morgan G (2011) Short-term memory in signed languages: not just a dis-advantage for serial recall. Front. Psychology 2:102. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00102This article was submitted to Frontiers in Language Sciences, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.Copyright © 2011 Marshall, Mann and Morgan. This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.We speculate that these differences in structural organization between signed and spoken phonology mean that signers, when faced with an unfamiliar sign, have to monitor a larger repertoire of parameter values and parameter combinations. One way of construing “phonological heaviness” is in terms of there being more “degrees of freedom” in the phonological composition of a sign. Having fewer limits on what to expect in terms of the linguistic input’s pho-nological form imposes a greater STM load. Thinking in terms of “degrees of freedom” also makes predictions for non-word repeti-tion in spoken languages. Speakers of lan-guages with larger inventories of segments, syllable types, and metrical patterns (and therefore arguably less predictability in terms of how segments are sequenced and where stress falls) might repeat non-words less accurately than speakers of languages with smaller inventories, all other charac-teristics (e.g., syllable number) being equal.The “degrees of freedom” hypothesis needs fleshing out, but it has promise in helping us to understand why modality dif-ferences in STM exist, and why STM deals particularly effectively with speech.AcknowledgmentsChloë R. Marshall is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, Wolfgang Mann by a City University London Research Fellowship, and Gary Morgan by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (Grant 620-28-600 Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre).RefeRencesArchibald, L., and Gathercole, S. (2006). Non-word rep-etition: a comparison of tests. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 49, 970–983.Archibald, L., and Gathercole, S. (2007). Non-word rep-etition in specific language impairment: more than a phonological short-term memory deficit. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 14, 919–924.Baddeley, A., Thomson, N., and Buchanan, M. (1975). Word length and the structure of short term memory. J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 14, 575–589.Bavelier, D., Newport, E., Hall, M., Supalla, T. S., and Boutla, M. (2008). Ordered short-term memory dif-fers in signers and speakers: implications for models of short-term memory. Cognition 107, 433–459.Chi, M. (1977). Age differences in memory span. J. Exp. Child. Psychol. 23, 226–281.(2007) found that there was a role for pho-nology in explaining individual differences in non-word repetition accuracy above and beyond the impact of serial recall. We sug-gest therefore that STM differences between signed and spoken languages are not due solely to the advantages offered by temporal chunking, but also to differences in phono-logical structure. Here we speculate as to what those differences might be.Gozzi et al. (2011) propose a “same store, bigger units” explanation, according to which “signs are ultimately more difficult to retain because they are phonologically heavier than words” (p. 6). They suggest that signed material is “heavier” because even the simplest syllable requires the signer to process information about the four forma-tional parameters of a sign, namely hand-shape, orientation, movement, and location. In contrast, they argue, a spoken-language syllable can consist of just a single vowel (for example, the spoken forms of the English words “eye” and “oh!”).That may be the case, but in non-words the amount of phonological material to be remembered is considerably larger than just a vowel. However, there are formational constraints on the construction of spoken syllables: from the inventory of sounds that a language allows its words to be built from, only a subset of those sounds can occur in word-initial, middle, and final posi-tions. In contrast, it is not clear that there are equivalent limits on the permutations of handshape, orientation, movement and location within signs. While there are well-formedness constraints on signs in terms of how many parameters can be combined (e.g., one specified handshape or location change) there do not appear to be restric-tions, for example, on which handshapes can occur with which locations (Orfanidou et al., 2010). As a result, signers have to be prepared to encounter many possible combinations of each formational parameter while processing novel signs, rather than following predictive routes. Furthermore, with respect to the pho-nological features that make up phonemes and sign parameters, signed languages have arguably around twice as many features as spoken languages (Sandler, 2008).Marshall et al. Short-term memory in signed languagesFrontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences  May 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 102 | 2

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