The Meeting Point: Where Language Production and Working Memory Share Resources

Abstract

The interaction between working memory and language processing is widely discussed in cognitive research. However, those studies often explore the relationship between language comprehension and working memory (WM). The role of WM is rarely considered in language production, despite some evidence suggesting a relationship between the two cognitive systems. This study attempts to fill that gap by using a complex span task during language production. We make our predictions based on the reorganization of elementary functions neurocognitive model, a usage based theory about grammatical status, and language production models. In accordance with these theories, we expect an overlap between language production and WM at one or more levels of language planning. Our results show that WM is involved at the phonological encoding level of language production and that adding WM load facilitates language production, which leads us to suggest that an extra task-specific storage is being created while the task is performed.

Anterior and Posterior Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus Contribute to the Implementation of Grammatical Determiners During Language Production

“…Specifically, pIFG may be involved in the phonological aspects of grammatical processing, whereas aIFG may be responsible for processing semantic information of grammatical and lexical items. Using the same behavioral paradigm, in both healthy subjects and agrammatic patients, our group found converging evidence that grammatical items are processed differently from lexical items (Ishkhanyan et al, 2017(Ishkhanyan et al, , 2019Michel Lange et al, 2017Boye and Bastiaanse, 2018;Nielsen et al, 2019). Together, the results encourage future research into the joint contributions of frontal and parietotemporal brain regions to these processes during language production.…”

The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca’s aphasia

“…The definition of grammatical items as dependent on a host item entails the hypothesis that the production of these items is more complicated than the production of lexical items, as reflected in response times and accuracy measures. This hypothesis was confirmed in studies of the production of verbs and determiners (Lange, Messerschmidt, Harder, Siebner & Boye, 2017;Lange, Messerschmidt & Boye, 2018;Ishkhanyan, Boye & Mogensen, 2018;cf. Section 4.1).…”

“…The order of the items was fully randomised, meaning that no participants saw the items in the same order. The design described above was originally developed to test healthy participants (Lange et al, 2018;Ishkhanyan et al, 2018; see Section 4.1 for a summary of the results of these studies).…”

“…They found that in the fastest half of the participants, 3 production of grammatical indefinite articles was associated with longer reaction times and lower accuracy rates than production of lexical numerals. Ishkhanyan et al (2018) also applied the test to NBD persons, but added a complex span task to the test in order to investigate the role of working memory. They found that production of the grammatical indefinite articles was associated with lower accuracy rates than production of the lexical numerals.…”

Working Memory Training: Assessing the Efficiency of Mnemonic Strategies

“…As a consequence, WM capacity is associated with such abilities, with the result of being considered an important predictor in many cognitive domains. For instance, it has been correlated with multi-tasking [ 7 ], executive functions [ 8 ], language abilities [ 9 , 10 ] and with the capacity to reason with novel information [ 11 , 12 ]. Conversely, a lower WM capacity has been associated with cognitive disorders, in particular with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ 13 ] and with learning difficulties [ 14 ].…”