WORKING-MEMORY IN THE ACQUISITION OF VOCABULARY AND SYNTAX - PUTTING LANGUAGE IN GOOD ORDER

This paper argues that working memory is heavily involved in language acquisition as (a) a major part of language learning is the learning o f sequences, (b) working memory allows short-term maintenance of seque nce information, and (c) short-term rehearsal of sequences promotes th e consolidation of long-term memories of language sequences. It first reviews evidence supporting this position. Next it presents an experim ent that demonstrates that subjects encouraged to rehearse foreign lan guage (FL) utterances are better than both silent controls and subject s who are prevented from rehearsal by articulatory suppression at (a) learning to comprehend and translate FL words and phrases, (b) explici t metalinguistic knowledge of the detailed content of grammatical regu larities, (c) acquisition of the FL forms of words and phrases, (d) ac curacy in FL pronunciation, and (e) some aspects of productive (but no t receptive) grammatical fluency and accuracy Finally, it describes po ssible mechanisms underlying these effects.