The foundations of verbal working memory in the language system

Steve Majorus

Professeur à l’Université de Liège

https://www.uliege.be/cms/c_9054334/fr/repertoire?uid=u182078

Many models of verbal working memory acknowledge interactions with verbal long-term memory. The nature of these interactions remains, however, a matter of debate. I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing that (1) even subtle aspects of language knowledge such as syntactic positional knowledge can influence verbal working memory, (2) the capacity and neural substrates of verbal working memory cannot be defined independently of the linguistic nature of the stimuli to-be-maintained, (3) recruitment of deep semantic knowledge may not characterize all WM situations. Our results support hybrid linguistic models of verbal WM considering that verbal WM is grounded in the language system but cannot be reduced to it.