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Interactions between language and memory (Lew et al., 2024)

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posted on 2024-09-25, 14:29 authored by Emilia C. Lew, Anastasia Sares, Annie C. Gilbert, Yue Zhang, Alexandre Lehmann, Mickael Deroche

Purpose: Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants’ recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here, we questioned whether these variations could impact performance differentially in one language or another.

Method: In a series of online studies evaluating auditory short-term memory in normally hearing adults, we examined how pitch patterns (Experiment 1), timing patterns (Experiment 2), and interactions between the two (Experiment 3) affected free recall of words, cued recall of forgotten words, and mental demand. Note that visual memory was never directly tested; written words were only used after auditory encoding in the cued recall part. Studies were administered in both French and English, always conducted with native listeners.

Result: Confirming prior work, grouping mechanisms facilitated free recall, but not cued recall (the latter being only affected by longer presentation time) or ratings of mental demand. Critically, grouping by pitch provided more benefit for French than for English listeners, while grouping by time was equally beneficial in both languages.

Conclusion: Pitch is more useful to French- than to English-speaking listeners for encoding spoken words in short-term memory, perhaps due to the syllable-based versus stress-based rhythms inherent to each language.

Supplemental Material S1. Information regarding the physical demand, temporal demand, subjective performance, effort, and frustration components of the NASA-TLX.

Supplemental Material S2. Distribution of fluency in other languages (than the first language used exclusively in testing) by the two groups of participants in each experiment. The French-speaking group was more bilingual than the English-speaking group, especially in Experiment 3.

Lew, E. C., Sares, A., Gilbert, A. C., Zhang, Y., Lehmann, A., & Deroche, M. (2024). Differences between French and English in the use of suprasegmental cues for the short-term recall of word lists. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(10), 3748–3761. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00655

Funding

This research was supported by the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex System (https://www.mitacs.ca) Accelerate Program, in collaboration with Oticon Medical Canada, under Grant IT16878 (awarded to M. Deroche and A. Lehmann).

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