The Relationship Between Phonological Loop And Memory Of Chinese Syllable Duration

Phonological loop, an important subsystem of Baddeley's Working MemoryModel (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), is mostly responsible for storing and processingauditory information. Lots of researches in the past 30 years, form both cognitivepsychology and cognitive neuroscience, have proved that phonological loop includestwo relatively independent components, that is, phonological storage and articulatorycontrol process. Phonological storage system can retain phonological information for1 to 2s. Items stored in it are all represented as phonological structure. The later,articulatory control process, has two main functions. One is rehearsal function whichactives declining representations by rehearsing, and the other is phonologicaltransform function, which will transform written words into phonological codes andstore them into the phonological storage system.Syllable duration, i.e. time lastingduring pronouncing the phonological syllable, is an important prosody feature. Itmakes sense for expressing one's meaning. Past researches have suggested thatphonological loop is related to duration memory. The purpose of current research is toexplore the relationship between phonological loop and Chinese syllable durationmemory. In Experiment 1, performance of duration memory is compared betweenarticulatory suppression and control conditions. Result shows that performance undersuppression condition is significantly lower than control condition. This differencesuggests that articulatory control process is a function of duration memory. InExperiment 2, there are three conditions: control condition, rhyme judgment conditionand duration interruption condition. We find that memory performance under durationinterruption is significantly lower than under rhyme judgment and control conditionsand performance between rhyme judgment and control conditions has not shownsignificant difference. These results indicate that phonological information andduration information are independent in process.