Dr Hannah Harvey, RHUL

Towards a perceptual-motor account of verbal sequence learning

A basic facet of language learning is the ability to learn the initially novel sequence of elements that make up a new word. The dominant theory of verbal sequence learning is that such learning is dependent on the short-term storage of verbal material in a modality-independent (i.e., abstract) phonological code (e.g. Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). An alternative hypothesis we are testing in this project is that verbal sequence learning may be explained more parsimoniously in terms of the parasitic use of general-purpose motor-planning and perceptual organisation processes. This talk will outline our current work focussed on extrapolating the implications of recent research pointing to a perceptual-motor account of verbal serial short-term memory to verbal sequence learning. In particular, we are currently investigating whether the basis of a correlation between nonword repetition ability and vocabulary acquisition—taken classically as a key piece of support for the phonological store-based account of verbal sequence learning—can be reconstrued in terms of perceptual-motor processes.

Keywords: verbal sequence learning; motor learning; short term memory