Journal of memory and language最新文献

{"title":"On the interplay between maintenance systems in verbal working memory","authors":"Maximilien Labaronne ,&nbsp;Dalia Kerimici ,&nbsp;Pierre Barrouillet ,&nbsp;Valérie Camos","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104742","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104742","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Most models of working memory (WM) include two systems for maintaining verbal information: one specific using verbal rehearsal and the other, general-purpose, relying on attention. These systems have been studied independently, but little is known about their interplay. The present study aimed at examining their interaction, especially when the verbal specific system is overloaded. Our hypothesis was that, in such a case, the attention-based system takes over, hence depleting attentional resources for maintenance. Though previously mentioned, this hypothesis has never been formally tested. We took advantage of a new methodology based on the Maxispan instructions, which controls the involvement of each system in immediate serial recall tasks. In the Maxispan instructions, participants cumulatively rehearse orally a defined number of the earlier items until recall, while also memorizing the subsequent items. Their performance was compared to that obtained in the regular instructions condition (i.e., no specific instructions). The articulatory demand of the verbal specific system was also manipulated by presenting either monosyllabic or trisyllabic words or pseudowords. Across five experiments, results supported our hypotheses. Maxispan (vs. regular) instructions led to improved recall performance for both rehearsed and non-rehearsed items. Importantly, rehearsing more syllables in the Maxispan instructions impaired maintenance of the later non-rehearsed items, bringing their recall close to the level of the regular instructions condition. These findings shed light on the interplay between the two systems of verbal maintenance, constraining WM models. Moreover, some peculiarities in words recall questioned the role of semantics in WM.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104742"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145928992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does perceptual learning for segmental phonotactics generalize across talkers?","authors":"Jeremy Steffman ,&nbsp;Megha Sundara","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104731","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104731","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this study we present a set of experiments testing the conditions under which listeners generalize perceptual learning for biphone phonotactics across talkers. Listeners were exposed to skewed CV biphone distributions at the endpoints of a phonetic VOT continuum with more ambiguous steps having an unbiased (flat) distribution. We first replicated previous findings that listeners generalized learning from biasing contexts to perceive the higher probability biphone at ambiguous continuum steps, when all stimuli were produced by the same talker. Next, we showed that listeners also generalize learning from biphone biasing contexts learned from one talker to a new talker. Notably, there was no further improvement when listeners were presented with multiple talkers producing skewed biphone distributions. Additionally, when exposed to two talkers producing two distinct biphone distributions, listeners failed to learn talker-specific biphone probabilities, and instead evidenced learning for biphone statistics pooled across talkers. That is, listeners extracted talker-independent biphone information. We also found evidence for a possible role for talker similarity: listeners generalized somewhat more strongly between similar talkers, and when acoustic similarity for stimuli within a particular talker is greater. We argue that the results support talker-independent perceptual learning for phonotactics, which is likely learned over representations that are rich enough to encode talker information, separately.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104731"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146035509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What roles do constituents play in the identification of Chinese compound words? A meta-analytic review","authors":"Qiwei Zhang ,&nbsp;Junhui Wu ,&nbsp;Erik D. Reichle ,&nbsp;Xingshan Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104743","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104743","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Because compound words comprised of two (or more) constituents make up the majority of Chinese vocabulary, understanding how they are processed and identified is critical for understanding the mechanisms that support the reading of Chinese. This <em>meta</em>-analytic review thus investigated whether Chinese compound words are processed and identified in a compositional versus holistic manner. Our <em>meta</em>-analysis includes 268 constituent effect sizes derived from 81 studies involving 5,911 participants. Overall, we found a statistically significant, albeit small, constituent effect (Hedges’ <em>g</em>_rm = 0.22, 95% CI [0.18, 0.25]). The magnitude of this effect varied across study designs, being significantly larger when words were presented in isolation than within sentences, and in studies using preview methods rather than natural reading. Consistent with compositional processing, evidence from both behavioral and neurophysiological experiments also suggested that constituent effects occurred at the orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing levels. These findings highlight the significant role of constituents in Chinese compound-word identification, encompassing both form and semantics. Finally, although these discoveries have significant implications for existing and future models of Chinese reading, we should warn the readers that the average effect sizes should be interpreted with caution. The present study showed substantial heterogeneity, which calls for future studies to understand the underlying reasons for the variabilities across studies.</div></div><div><h3>Public Significance Statement</h3><div>This <em>meta</em>-analysis suggests that, in Chinese reading, individual constituents of compound words have a small but significant facilitative effect on their orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing across different word presentation methods and tasks. These findings are important for understanding how compound words are processed and identified in Chinese but also shed light on the universal mechanisms of compound-word processing across languages. These findings also suggest that the unique properties of a language’s script influence the cognitive mechanisms that support word identification. In the future, the findings from this study may help improve the efficiency of Chinese language instruction.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104743"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146035510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Knowing a translation pair by the cross-linguistic company it keeps: cross-linguistic context consistency shapes semantic overlap in bilingual conceptual representation","authors":"Yufeng Liu ,&nbsp;Shifa Chen ,&nbsp;Marco Marelli ,&nbsp;Yue Qin","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104729","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104729","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Traditional bilingual conceptual representation models assume semantic overlap between translation equivalents varies due to the differing number of shared semantic features. This study proposes an alternative hypothesis that cross-linguistic context consistency drives the semantic overlap variability in bilingual conceptual representation. To test this hypothesis, we introduce an unsupervised Semantic Alignment Model (SAM) that quantifies the contextual congruency of translation and non-translation pairs across two languages. In experiment 1, a translation recognition task demonstrates<!--> <!-->the non-holistic nature of bilingual conceptual representation and supports the three assumptions of the Revised Hierarchical Model. A subsequent computational simulation experiment validates SAM’s cognitive plausibility: it mirrors the concreteness effect on translation priming observed in forward translation recognition, revealing that language statistics alone suffice to account for the bilingual concreteness advantage. Finally, experiment 3′s two ad-hoc analyses show that higher semantic alignment <em>Rc</em>s predict both greater processing efficiency and higher similarity ratings of translation pairs, with alignment’s predictability surpassing concreteness in bilinguals’ chronometric performance. Crucially, SAM’s prediction reflects the developmental hypothesis in translation recognition that concreteness cannot capture. These findings challenge the adequacy of purely feature-based bilingual conceptual representation models, which lack explicit mechanisms for how semantic features are learned and represented in the first place. Instead, our findings indicate a distributional view in which bilinguals tacitly track cross-linguistic contextual usage consistency that forms the basis for semantic overlap between translation equivalents in the bilingual mind. This study extends the tenet of distributional semantics to bilingualism, and underscores the dynamic, distributional nature of bilingual semantic memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104729"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145903952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Context ameliorates but does not eliminate garden-pathing: Novel insights from latent-process modeling","authors":"Dario Paape,&nbsp;Shravan Vasishth","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104748","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104748","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A theoretically important claim in psycholinguistics is that in English, linguistic context largely eliminates garden-path effects in temporary complement clause/relative clause ambiguities (e.g., Altmann et al., 1992). However, this strong claim, based on comparing mean differences between groups of conditions in a factorial design, reduces the conclusion to an overly simplistic binary one: either context affects garden-pathing or it doesn’t. Mean differences are an aggregate of different, non-deterministic parsing steps that could be very different from trial to trial. As a result, there may not be a simple yes-no answer to whether context eliminates garden-pathing. Sentence comprehension has been argued to involve a cascade of probabilistically occurring latent processes (e.g., Paape and Vasishth, 2022); seen in this way, context-sensitivity may only be occurring probabilistically and in a graded manner. We present a hierarchical multinomial processing tree (MPT) model that spells out several probabilistic latent processes. The model reveals new insights into the impact of context on garden-pathing, going beyond the simple question of whether context reduces processing difficulty <em>on average</em>. Modeling using new data from a bidirectional self-paced reading study with 319 participants shows that context affects both first-pass attachment probability and reanalysis cost. Because a simpler account of context effects than the MPT model could be a model based on surprisal, we compare the MPT model’s predictive fit to a model using surprisal computed from large language models. Results show that the MPT model, which assumes a mixture distribution of reading times, outperforms surprisal-based models at predicting garden-path effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104748"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The semantics behind the inference: How first language quantifier systems shape scalar reasoning in second language learners","authors":"Glenn Starr ,&nbsp;Greta Mazzaggio","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104727","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104727","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates how L1-Japanese learners of English pragmatically enrich quantifiers in the L2, focusing on the role of L1 semantics, lexical competition, and contextual informativeness. Our central aim was to chart cross-linguistic and interlanguage differences in the underlying quantifier systems of English and Japanese, and to assess how these shape the lower and upper semantic thresholds of scalar terms like <em>some</em>. Using the gumball paradigm developed within a Constraint-Based framework, we elicited gradient naturalness judgments across two experiments to map how <em>some</em> is distributed over fine-grained numerosity continua. In unpressured contexts with limited competitors (Experiment 1), L2 learners patterned closely with native English speakers in their interpretations of <em>some</em>, suggesting emerging target-like intuitions. However, when the lexical alternatives <em>a few</em> and <em>most</em> were introduced alongside <em>some</em> (Experiment 2), systematic L1-based transfer effects emerged: learners interpreted <em>a few</em> and <em>most</em> in line with their Japanese counterparts (<em>sukoshi</em>, <em>hotondo</em>), displaying narrower or delayed acceptability ranges. These transfer patterns disrupted scalar coordination, resulting in an expanded acceptability window for <em>some</em> and a unique scalar reasoning profile. Together, the results map how cross-linguistic differences in quantifier systems affect L2 learners’ scalar representations and highlight the need for models of inference development to incorporate language-specific constraints on quantifier meaning alongside consideration of pragmatic mechanisms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104727"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146035511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Effects of specific negative emotions on the retrieval dynamics underlying recognition memory decisions","authors":"Elif Yüvrük ,&nbsp;Aycan Kapucu","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104745","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104745","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the present study, we investigated the effects of specific negative emotions on decision processes in recognition memory in two experiments. The diffusion model of recognition memory (<span><span>Ratcliff, 1978</span></span>) was utilized to decompose the decision process into its components. Thus, we examined the effects of emotion on i., starting point (z), which refers to the participant’s motivational predisposition to one of two recognition decisions before the decision process is initiated, ii., boundary separation (a), which refers to how much information is needed to make a recognition decision, iii., and total drift rate (v_total), which refers to the relative weight given to novelty vs. familiarity information during the decision-making process. In two experiments, participants were first asked to study a set of emotional and neutral pictures and then to discriminate them from new ones that had not been presented before. The effects of disgust-related, fear-related, and neutral pictures were tested either immediately (Exp 1) or after a 24-hour retention interval that allows for consolidation (Exp 2). A more liberal z emerged strongly in the disgust condition compared to the fear condition, both before and after consolidation. Participants were less cautious in responding to neutral items before consolidation (Exp 1) and to emotional items after consolidation (Exp 2) as reflected in the boundary separation a, regardless of specific emotion qualities. v_total was influenced by emotionality such that familiarity information was retrieved more effectively for emotional items compared to neutral ones before consolidation, yet this effect was more pronounced in the disgust condition after consolidation. Taken together, these experiments suggested that specific emotions influence not only the outcome of the recognition decision but also the underlying retrieval dynamics of those decisions, and these effects can better be explained by appraisal and emotion-specific properties inherent to each specific emotion.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104745"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146035513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Suspect-filler similarity: replicating distinctive features in police lineups","authors":"Georgia Harris ,&nbsp;Aleena Mahmood ,&nbsp;John T. Wixted ,&nbsp;Heather D. Flowe ,&nbsp;Melissa F. Colloff","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104744","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104744","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Worldwide, police test eyewitness memory using a lineup, containing an innocent or guilty suspect and several fillers. How similar-looking the fillers should be to the suspect has not been sufficiently answered, possibly due to a lack of guiding cognitive models. We made predictions using a new signal-detection model assuming feature-matching logic and discounting of shared features. Participants encoded a perpetrator with a distinctive feature. In two pre-registered experiments, we tested how replicating a similar but non-identical feature across the fillers (low feature-similarity replication) influenced identification accuracy compared to replicating an identical feature (high feature-similarity replication), and an unfair condition in which the feature was not replicated. In Experiment 1 (<em>N</em> = 4,915), the innocent suspect’s feature matched the description of the perpetrator’s. As predicted, low compared to high feature-similarity replication increased the hit rate without affecting the false alarm rate and increased ability to discriminate innocent from guilty suspects. In Experiment 2 (<em>N</em> = 1,964), the innocent suspect’s feature was identical to the perpetrator’s and, as predicted, the effect on discriminability was reversed. The model provides a useful theoretical framework, and police should not needlessly match features across a lineup that could be useful cues to identity, as this may harm witness performance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104744"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Morphemes in the wild: Modelling affix learning from the noisy landscape of natural text","authors":"Maria Korochkina ,&nbsp;Marco Marelli ,&nbsp;Kathleen Rastle","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104746","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104746","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Morphological knowledge serves as a powerful heuristic for vocabulary growth and contributes significantly to the speed and efficiency of reading. While research has long sought to explain how the knowledge of derivational morphology is acquired, previous approaches have struggled to capture the nuanced and complex ways in which derivational morphemes are used in written language, particularly that these morphemes contribute to meaning in a graded manner and that noise introduced by misleading forms (e.g., <em>deliver</em>) can impede learning. Our approach builds on earlier insights but moves beyond them by combining a large-scale analysis of vocabulary used in 1,200 popular books with computational modelling to explore how learning of derivational affixes may occur from text containing naturally occurring noise. We use a compositional distributional semantic model to investigate what can be learned about the meanings of individual English prefixes and suffixes through reading and evaluate the model’s performance against data from 120 adults in a lexical processing task. Our findings demonstrate that, despite the presence of noise, natural text contains sufficient structure to support the extraction of core affix semantics, and that readers are attuned to the complex patterns that shape affix use in the wild. This work contributes a new dimension to a more principled and psychologically grounded account of morpheme learning, and we discuss both this contribution and the broader insights it offers for language research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104746"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hierarchical relations guide memory retrieval in sentence comprehension: Evidence from a local anaphor in Turkish","authors":"Özge Bakay,&nbsp;Faruk Akkuş,&nbsp;Brian Dillon","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104747","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2026.104747","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Real-time sentence comprehension relies on memory resources to establish syntactic dependencies. Such dependency formation is subject to hierarchical constraints on interpretation. However, it remains an open question how hierarchical information is represented and used in working memory. Here we asked whether hierarchical relations between noun phrases as in <em>x c-commands y</em> (Reinhart, 1976) constrain antecedent retrieval for a local anaphor. We measured the real-time reactivation of hierarchically available target antecedents and unavailable distractors in processing the Turkish reciprocal <em>birbirleri</em> via three visual world studies. Our design deconfounded hierarchical relational information between noun phrases from other structural information (clause-mateness, case, subjecthood) and linear order/recency. Experiment 1 compared the reactivation of hierarchically available subjects and clause-mate, similarly case-marked, hierarchically unavailable distractors. Subjects were rapidly distinguished from distractors within the reciprocal window, irrespective of their linear order. Experiment 2 revealed that hierarchically available indirect objects showed a similar advantage at retrieval. Experiment 3 was a pre-registered, high-powered replication of this result. Overall, we found that hierarchical relations between noun phrases within a single clause rapidly determine antecedent availability in retrieval. Our findings suggest that either linguistic representations encode hierarchically informed features targeted by retrieval cues, or that hierarchical information shapes the organization of linguistic representations in memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"148 ","pages":"Article 104747"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146189312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}