Short Article: The Hebb Repetition Effect as a Laboratory Analogue of Novel Word Learning

Abstract

The present study tests the hypothesis that a common ordering mechanism underlies both short-term serial recall of verbal materials and the acquisition of novel long-term lexical representations, using the Hebb repetition effect. In the first experiment, participants recalled visually presented nonsense syllables following a typical Hebb effect learning protocol. Replicating the Hebb repetition effect, we observed improved recall for repeated sequences of syllables. In the second experiment, the same participants performed an auditory lexical decision task, which included nonwords that were constructed from the syllables used in the first experiment. We observed inhibited rejection of nonwords that were composed of the repeated Hebb sequences, compared to nonwords that were built from nonrepeated filler sequences. This suggests that a long-term phonological lexical representation developed during Hebb learning. Accordingly, the relation between immediate serial recall and word learning is made explicit by arguing that the Hebb repetition effect is a laboratory analogue of naturalistic vocabulary acquisition.

Linking memory and language: Evidence for a serial-order learning impairment in dyslexia

“…With this aim, participants again learned Hebb sequences (e.g., lava-bu-sa-fa-ra-re-si-di), containing lexical competitors (e.g., lavabu, safara, residi) of Inherent to the use of the lexical competition approach is the requirement that Hebb sequences closely resemble known words represented in the mental lexicon. Importantly, the earlier studies using this lexical-competitor approach (Szmalec et al, 2012) have demonstrated that this procedure yields Hebb learning curves (for normal readers) comparable to standard verbal Hebb learning curves (Szmalec et al, 2009(Szmalec et al, , 2011(Szmalec et al, , 2012, suggesting that the learning of syllable sequences derived from existing words does not seem to rely on strong support from these words. This might be due to the fact that the Hebb procedure exposes the participant to individual syllables, presented one by one, while the gradual and implicit grouping of those syllables into pseudoword-forms is only the outcome of the Hebb-learning process.…”

“…Typically, a limited number of phonemes or graphemes form different words, depending on their order, and these words in turn are sequentially aligned to form sentences. Long-term acquisition of serial-order information is therefore a critical component for extracting regularities from the phonological (and, by extension, orthographic) input which constitutes a given linguistic environment (see Aslin & Newport, 2012) and for learning new word-forms (Page & Norris, 2008Szmalec et al, 2009Szmalec et al, , 2012. This rationale has been the basis of the Serial-Order…”

“…HRL of a syllable sequence like "lo fo du" is therefore assumed to be functionally equivalent to acquiring the novel word-form "LOFODU", similar to the way in which children learn new words by picking up statistical regularities from the verbal input in their environment (e.g., Saffran et al, 1996). Experimental evidence for the hypothesis that HRL mimics naturalistic word-form acquisition was provided by Szmalec and colleagues (Szmalec, Duyck, Vandierendonck, Barberá-Mata, & Page, 2009;Szmalec, Page, & Duyck, 2012). In these experiments, that included only normal readers, participants typically had to recall nonsense sequences of nine visually presented consonant-vowel syllables (CVs), with each sequence grouped by short pauses into three three-CV groups (e.g., "fi ke da -sa mo pu -vo ti zu").…”

“…Previous studies in normal readers have shown measurable savings from earlier HRL in an unannounced test three months after learning (Page & Norris, 2008), supporting the claim that HRL is indeed long-term learning. In the case of verbal HRL, it is assumed that the learned sequence creates novel entries in the mental lexicon (Szmalec et al, 2009(Szmalec et al, , 2012; see above). Szmalec et al (2011) explicitly characterized their serial-order account as a 'learning account': the dyslexic disadvantage is assumed to exist at the stage of the long-term learning of serial-order information (rather than solely at the stage of short-term representation of this information, although data suggest such a short-term deficit toosee below).…”

A model linking immediate serial recall, the Hebb repetition effect and the learning of phonological word forms

“…For example, it has been shown (e.g. Szmalec et al 2009; referred to earlier) that for grouped lists, individual groups can be learned provided that the groups themselves repeat across lists, even if the order in which the groups appear changes across presentations. For example, groups G1, G2 and G3 might be learned by exposure to the different lists G1 -G2 -G3, G2 -G3 -G1 and G3 -G1 -G2 (where the dash represents, say, a pause).…”