alan baddeley: phonological loop and language acquisition

[@fskfhg]

Cool to watch vid from the mad genius himself

[@jezzricochrane8619]

Is it possible to get a transcript of this?

[@ibrahimmahdi4645]

nope lol

[@ArroyoFlush]

there are a number of problems one was what's it for you know is this just there to entertain cognitive psychologists at that time I was fortunate in some Italian collaborators Pepe Villar and Costanza papania who had identified a patient in Italy with a very pure fern illogical short-term memory deficit and so we got a small grant and I went over to Italy and we would go and test her into your in she ran a shop that sold sort of tourist antiques and things of this sort and we would go along and she'd put the closed notice in the window and we then test her short-term memory and see what she could and couldn't do and the idea was that given that her intelligence was normal her long-term memory as normal language was normal if we found out what she couldn't do this has tell us what the phonological loop was for well we started off testing her comprehension we did find that if we had long enough sentences and sentences carefully designed so that you needed to remember the first word right up to the end in order to disambiguate it we couldn't make her fail but it seemed unlikely that evolution had actually prepared us just to cope with sort of badly written prose and so we tried another line we thought well maybe it's learning new phonological material so we decided we try and teach Russian with vocabulary so we presented her visually or auditorily with a sequence of eight Russian words she had to learn that the Italian equivalent or we gave her the task of learning to associate pairs of unrelated words in her native Italian and we reckoned that that should be based on semantic memory and should be unimpaired and we compared her with a group of eight people matched for agent intelligence what we found was that on the Italian words she was absolutely fine absolutely normal but the Russian vocabulary she was terrible at the end of ten trials she'd not mastered a single Russian word and so that had told us given us a hint that okay this seems to be a system for acquiring language but it's always important to replicate and we didn't have access at that time to another similar case so we fell back on our old strategy of turning a student subjects into patients by giving them things that would in this case block their fur no logical loop so we had them learning vocabulary while suppressing articulation blah blah blah blah blah or we varied the length and so forth and what we found was that as predicted this didn't interfere with paired associate learning in their native language but it did interfere with acquisition of new material and since then it's been shown I think fairly clearly that there is an association between this system and the ability to learn a second foreign language but what about native language maybe that's immune well we were able to test that I got a new person who'd been a postdoc with Donald Broadbent in Oxford who came to work with me and was looking around for a project when we had visit from a linguist who talked about this rather interesting group of children with specific language impairment so they had normal intelligence but their language was several years behind what it should be and we thought maybe just maybe they had a phonological loop deficit we were lucky enough to find that there was a group of such children in Cambridge and we studied them and found that sure enough they also had problems in learning new word forms we found that they had problems in learning first of all nonsense syllables we then developed a more specific test that targeted this by looking at non words of different lengths so they might be quite short words like or non words like bala p' or they could be quite long like blunt escaping or Wooga lamech and what we found was that normal children or indeed children who were the same language age as these which was two years earlier were pretty good with this they had some trouble with the long words but that our children with the specific language impairment were greatly impaired particularly as the words got longer and in fact this is now a standard test that's used as part of a diagnosis for dyslexia or specific learning impairment um that raised the question of is it only children who have a major problem in this area that have difficulty or is it true of the population as a whole so we were able to interest local schools and we took the whole of one year that was starting up aged between four and five and we tested their non-word repetition their intelligence and their vocabulary using a test in which you present four pictures and you speak the word of one of them and the child has to point to that object and they become cause less and less frequent until the child doesn't know the word what we were able to show was that yes we did get good correlation between normal repetition and vocabulary and further more that if we study them over the next year they're non-word repetition predicted how much they would improve their vocabulary and this has now been repeated lots of times interesting the person who did this with me Susan gather Kohl still works in this area and has hugely developed it showing that tests based on working memory can be used to identify quite young children who are likely to have scholastic problems and problems of different sorts and also there's no strong suggestion that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder particularly the attention deficit part is associated with working memory deficit though not the phonological loop part so we made I think a pretty good case for the role of the phonological loop in language acquisition although it's important to point out that having a reduced phonological loop in and of itself doesn't mean that you won't acquire a good vocabulary because as the child gets older other factors come in I mean one being executive processes because a lot of the cavalry we acquire we acquire because of understanding what that unfamiliar word must mean in that context and to do that you need to understand what's going on also of course the richness of the language environment is important but nevertheless it still is an important factor in remembering names remembering new words and sometimes things like making spoonerisms where you switch around initial letters like Park Park instead of car park