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Short-Term Memory In Second Language Learners of ASL The Competing Effects of Modality and Mother Tongue

echanisms behind auditory linguistic short-term memory (STM) have been the focus of much research over the past several decades. Studies of memory span began with Miller's famous finding that for English speakers, STM has a limited capacity of about seven items. 1 That hypothesis has since been modified several times as evidence has been uncovered suggesting that memory span is limited not by the number of items to be recalled, but by the time needed to mentally rehearse these items. That is, words that take longer to mentally rehearse result in a decreased span. 2 Cross-linguistically, languages in which names for digits are shorter show longer digit spans, and opposite is true for languages with longer digit names. 3,4 When Miller's hypothesis is recast in terms of time, auditory linguistic STM is observed to hold roughly 2 seconds worth of information. Since English digits have an articulation time somewhere in the neighborhood of 310msec to 321msec, basic arithmetic explains that English digit span should be around 7 items. General Structure of Short-Term Memory The current preferred model for describing STM comes from consists of a three part structure: a " visuospatial sketchpad, " a " phonological loop, " and a " central executive. " 6,7 The phonological loop is itself divided into a phonological storage buffer and an articulatory rehearsal loop. Evidence for this division comes from two well-established phenomena: the phonological similarity effect and the effect of articulatory suppression. The phonological similarity effect refers to the fact that STM span decreases when the items to be recalled are too phonologically similar, which suggests that the phonological information is used for encoding and rehearsal. 8 Articulatory suppression occurs when subjects are instructed to continually repeat a certain utterance during a test of STM. This also results in a lower span, suggesting that mental representation of phonological information also draws on articulatory mechanisms. 9 It is important to note, however, that these studies almost universally use linguistic stimuli, and thus it has been difficult to parse out effects that are due to the linguistic nature of the stimuli which may differ from those due to the simple auditory nature of the stimuli. The visuospatial sketchpad is subdivided into visual and spatial STM, which each exhibit a certain degree of independence with a certain degree of interaction, the exact nature of which is not yet understood. Tests of visuospatial STM are known …