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Comparing Sign Language and Speech Reveals a Universal Limit on Short-Term Memory Capacity

Margaret Wilson¹; Karen Emmorey²

¹ University of California, Santa Cruz · ² San Diego State University

Short-term memory (STM) for signs in native signers consistently shows a smaller capacity than STM for words in native speakers (see Emmorey, 2002, for review). One explanation of this difference is based on the length effect: Short items yield higher spans than items that take longer to pronounce, presumably because of limited processing time. Signs in American Sign Language (ASL) take longer to articulate than English words (Bellugi & Fischer, 1972). This is not problematic in natural language use, because ASL conveys information simultaneously. However, with immediate serial recall, articulation time looms large. Some researchers have argued that articulation time is sufficient to account for the sign-speech difference in STM (Emmorey, 2002; Marschark & Mayer, 1998; Wilson, 2001; Wilson & Emmorey, 1997). If so, then STM capacity is, at its root, governed by a general processing limitation that is not affected by language modality. However, this claim has never been adequately tested. If articulation time does not fully account for the sign-speech difference in STM, then other differences between sign and speech may be important. In particular, because vision and audition have strikingly different information-processing characteristics, the sign-speech difference could be due to perceptually based coding. If so, then the principles governing STM are locally determined and cannot be generalized across language modalities. Recently Boutla, Supalla, Newport, and Bavelier (2004) addressed this question using stimuli that are articulated very rapidly in ASL. The digits 1 through 9 and the letters of the fingerspelling alphabet in ASL are produced with the fingers of one hand without large-scale movement, and therefore can be produced very quickly. However, the hand shapes for the digits 1 through 9 in ASL are similar, and formational similarity reduces

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01766.x

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