2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Memory

Vocabulary learning and rote memory

Memory is crucial to learning. It is inconceivable that a person with a severe memory impairment could ever learn his or her native language, much less a second language. The learning of the simplest word requires memory. A person learning the word ‘dog’, for example, must retain a connection be- tween the hearing of ‘dog’ and the experience of seeing, touching or smelling

The greater the number of related occurrences needed for learning, the poorer a person’s memory. Second-language learners and teachers are for- ever talking of practice and review. The reason that practice and review is necessary at all is because of some lack in memory ability.

Syntax learning and episodic memory

Memory is similarly crucial for the learning of grammatical structures and rules. For example, in order to determine the type of questions that require ‘do’ (as in ‘Do you want some candy?’ but not in ‘Is the dog barking?’), how to negate sentences, how to use politeness structures (‘Please close the door’, ‘Would you please close the door?’, ‘Would you be so kind as to close the door?’), etc., memory is essential.

It is only through memory that a learner can accumulate the vast amount of speech and relevant situational data that serves as the basis for analyzing structures and formulating rules. It is not enough to remember whole phrases and sentences, the learner must also remember the situations in which these sentences were uttered in order to derive the meaning of those phrases and sentences and their syntax. The type of memory that involves situations     is what Tulving (1983) and others refer to as ‘episodic memory’. Thus, for example, outside the classroom, the degree of politeness of an utterance must be determined from the situation in which it occurs. The learner must note who is talking to whom and what their status is. This information must be remembered and associated with the different expressions, e.g. ‘Please close the door’, ‘Would you please close the door?’, ‘Would you please be so kind as to close the door?’

Children’s memory ability

Children under 7 years display a phenomenal ability at rote memorization. Older children,  however,  do  not,  with  some  decline  beginning  around  8 years of age and with more of a decline from about 12 years of age. Harley and Doug (1997) investigated students who were in an immersion language education programme (the teaching of subject matter through a second language). Older children began to apply their cognitive abilities in analyzing the syntactic rules of the second language while younger children relied more heavily on their use of rote memory for language learning. One could interpret these data as indicating perhaps that the older children jumped to syntactic analysis sooner because they realized that they had difficulty in remembering all of the sentences that they heard. In this regard, it seems that children’s ages can be usefully divided into at least two categories, under 7 years and 7 to 12 years. This is the rough categorization that we shall use.