Abstract

this paper we present a linguistically constrained model of the learning and recall of unfamiliar words in verbal short-term memory. All the words a mature speaker knows were once new to them, but normal speakers, even very young children, can often repeat a nonword after a single exposure (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989; Gathercole & Adams, 1993). The apparent simplicity of this task disguises what may be a rather complex system dedicated to the solution of a specific problem---the need to represent and recall serially ordered verbal stimuli. Spoken words are spread over time, so that there is no point at which all of the information to be retained is concurrently present. The serial structure of the stimulus (e.g., the order of phonemes in a syllable) is therefore central to the identity of the stimulus and must be retained. Once spoken, the word is no longer present in the environment, and cannot be reexamined at will (unlike, say, a typical visual stimulus). In order to repeat or rehearse a novel input, a single trial serial-order learning mechanism is needed. This mechanism must track the input in real-time and have produced a representation capable of supporting rehearsal by the time the stimulus finishes. It is proposed in the current work that this remarkable ability underlies the development of more long-term lexical-- phonological knowledge. As well as being of interest in its own right, the explication of this capacity is thus central to the understanding of language acquisition

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