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Recent theoretical accounts of verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory (STM) have proposed the existence of domain-general mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order information. These accounts are based on the observation of similar behavioural effects across several modalities, such as temporal grouping effects. Across two experiments, the present study aimed at extending these findings, by exploring a STM modality that has received little interest so far, STM for musical information. Given its inherent rhythmic, temporal and serial organisation, the musical domain is of interest for investigating serial order STM processes such as temporal grouping. In Experiment 1, the data did not allow to determine the presence or the absence of temporal grouping effects. In Experiment 2, we observed that temporal grouping of tone sequences during encoding improves short-term recognition for serially presented probe tones. Furthermore, the serial position curves included microprimacy and micro-recency effects, which are the hallmark characteristic of temporal grouping. Our results suggest that the encoding of serial order information in musical STM may be supported by temporal positional coding mechanisms similar to those reported in the verbal domain.Keywords: serial order, working memory, music and language, domain-general, rhythm IntroductionIn his influential paper, Lashley (1951) considered the capacity of the brain to process serial order information as one of the most complex types of human behaviour. This ability is involved in a wide range of human activities, such as speech perception (Grossberg, 2003) and production (Dell, 1986;Dell, Burger, & Svec, 1997;MacKay, 1970) and musical performance (Mathias, Pfordresher, & Palmer, 2015;Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003;Pfordresher, Palmer, & Jungers, 2007). Ironically, while Lashley (1951) illustrated the problem of serial order in behaviour with the case of serial order constraints that musicians have to deal with during musical performance, only little attention has been paid to serial order processing in the musical domain (but see . Serial ordering capacities have been extensively studied in the verbal domain, particularly in the context of verbal short-term memory (STM) tasks. In the verbal STM domain, a variable that has been observed to have a major impact on serial order processing is the effect of temporal grouping. The manipulation of the temporal grouping of memoranda has been shown to lead to generally improved recall accuracy relative to ungrouped memoranda and to a specific shape of the serial position curve characterised by intra-group primacy and recency effects (Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2004;Hartley, Hurlstone, & Hitch, 2016;Henson, 1996Henson, , 1999Hurlstone & Hitch, 2015;Ng & Maybery, 2002, 2005Parmentier, Andrés, Elford, & Jones, 2006;Parmentier, Maybery, & Jones, 2004;Ryan, 1969aRyan, , 1969b. The present study aimed at furthering our understanding of serial order STM for auditory material, by investigating the impact of temporal grouping manipulati...