Chairs: Steve Majerus (ULiège) This symposium will present recent developments in the field of memory and language research. Muhammet Ikbal Sahan will highlight the importance of eye-movement recordings in working memory research, including verbal working memory. He will show that delay period eye movements closely follow the geometric structure underlying not only visuospatial working memory but also verbal working memory. These findings suggest that scan patterns of eye movements are a promising approach to reveal how mental space is structured and accessed during short term-retention. Benjamin Kowialiewski and Klaus Oberauer will show that response suppression, a mechanism used by most working memory models for guiding response selection at retrieval, is not a tenable assumption. He will show that when an item is presented repeatedly in the same memory list, its recall probability increases instead of decreasing. These results demonstrate the non-plausibility of response suppression as a means of preventing item repetitions during recall. Hong Xiao and colleagues will present novel evidence for the grounding of verbal working memory in the linguistic system, for both item and serial order aspects of working memory. They will show that recall of word lists composed of adjective-noun pairs is influenced by their syntactic order regularity, irregularly ordered adjective-noun pairs leading to an increase of both item and serial order recall errors, as well as to adjective-noun positional regularization errors. These data show that verbal working memory is supported by syntactic knowledge, in addition to the phonological and semantic influences already demonstrated in the past. Finally, Louisa Bogaerts will provide further novel evidence for interactions between language and memory, by showing that linguistic statistical learning does not only support the identification of novel words in the continuous language stream, but also leads to novel linguistic knowledge. She will demonstrate that learned statistical patterns are available in memory for up to a week after learning. She will also examine how long-term linguistic knowledge derived from extensive native language exposure interacts with the acquisition of novel artificial languages.
