Phonological short-term memory capacity and non-adjacent dependency-learning

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between phonological short-term memory capacity and non-adjacent dependency-learning. Forty university students were exposed to four-element strings in which the first element was dependent to the last element. Participants were then tested with a discrimination task in which they were required to discriminate the trained dependencies from the untrained ones. Participants were also tested on their phonological short-term memory capacity and nonverbal intelligence. Results demonstrated that the performance of the discrimination task was positively correlated with the phonological short-term memory capacity. The study suggested that the non-adjacent dependency-learning performance increased with the phonological short-term memory capacity providing implication on typical and atypical language acquisition.