Serial order short- and long-term memory determinants of oral and written language acquisition

Abstract

When infants learn their first words, they are required to memorize sequences of sounds (phonemes) that have a particular meaning. Moreover, at the age of six years, children start to learn to decode written words, that is, sequences of letters (graphemes) that are assembled in a specific order, which determines the meaning of the word. In fact, the letter sequence stop does not have the same meaning as the sequence spot. Recently, two lines of research have shown, independently from each other, that learning oral or written words is dependent on serial order short-term memory (STM) ability on one hand, and serial order long-term memory (LTM) ability on the other hand. Nevertheless, we currently do not know when and how both forms of serial order memory are involved in vocabulary and literacy acquisition. The purpose of this thesis is to contrast STM and LTM for serial order in order to obtain a better understanding of the specific contribution of each type of serial order memory to oral and written word form learning. The findings reported here demonstrate that STM for serial order appears to be more strongly involved in the earliest stages of word form learning, while serial order LTM intervenes at a later stage allowing to transform novel linguistic information into proceduralized memory representations.(PSYE - Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation) -- UCL, 201