618 Psychology Bldg
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dept of Psychology (WJ Brogden Hall)
1202 West Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706-1696
E-Mail:
Phone: (608) 262-1897
Fax: (608) 262-4029
Graduate Student, Cognitive and Perceptual Sciences
ScB Cognitive Neuroscience, 2001, Brown University
Research Statement:
The goal of my research
is to better
understand the relationship between higher-level language processing
and what has traditionally been called working memory. It is my
belief that much of people's performance on short-term and working memory is emergent from
processes used in normal language comprehension and
production. This emergent properties perspective thus differs substantially from those who view verbal working memory as an independent system from those subserving language processing. By redefining people’s
performance on these tasks as a measure of various aspects of language
processing, I hope to better understand why previous researchers have found that certain measures of working
memory correlate with measures of language comprehension while others
do not. In approaching working memory from this perspective, it is impossible to not ask the opposite question, that is, under what instances of
language comprehension and production are the processes utilized in working
memory tasks recruited. I have a number of research projects to which I currently attend which allow me to address these questions.
In language comprehension, I have examined how the short-term maintenance of phonological representation influences online and offline measures of sentence processing. Through manipulating the amount of phonological overlap in sentences containing relative clauses, I have begun to demonstrate that individuals may use a phonological code to represent the serial order of words they encounter in the course of normal language comprehension.
More recently, the research I am conducting seeks elaborate the production-working memory relationship. I have examined the hypothesis that the process of phonological encoding in production serves as the domain-specific mechanism underlying the serial ordering of phonological representations in working memory. A recent review article that has been submitted highlights this relationship through examining the many similar behavioral, computational and theoretical perspective on this serial ordering mechanism coming from those in the production and working memory traditions. I have also begun to directly test this hypothesis by manipulating production-related difficulty in classic working memory tasks, such as the word span task. We have found a number of such influences in various manipulations including, but not limited to, tongue-twister effects and effects of articulatory overlap. Similarly, we supplement and extend typical analyses done by working memory researcher (i.e. recall accuracy and RT) through use classic measures from those coming from the speech production tradition, including speech error and duration analyses. Both have provided a much more detailed account of people's performance in short-term memory tasks, and demonstrate a tight link between production and working memory performance.
Ultimately, I hope that the research I am pursuing now will lead to a better understanding of what processes are involved in the short-term maintenance of verbal information both in the context of memory tasks and language processing. In the end, the insights I gain should aid traditional memory researchers in better understanding the language-related processes being used in short-term and working memory tasks, while simultaneously providing insight into how short-term memory processes are engaged in language comprehension and production.
Acheson, D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (submitted). Verbal Working Memory and Language Production: Common Approaches to the Serial Ordering of Verbal Information.
Acheson, D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (submitted). Phonological Effects on Sentence Comprehension.
Acheson, D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (submitted). Twisting Tongues and Memories: Explorations into the Relationship between Language Production and Verbal Working Memory.
Wells, J.B., Christiansen, M.H., Race, D.S., MacDonald, M.C. and Acheson, D.J. (in preparation). Experience and Sentence Comprehension: Statistical Learning, Working Memory, and Individual Differences.
Presentations & Posters:
Acheson,
D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (2004). Phonological
Interference in Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension. Poster presented
at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN.
Acheson,
D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (2005). A Role for Phonological
Information in Relative Clause Processing.
Poster presented at the 15th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Tucson, AZ.
Acheson,
D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (2005). A Phonological Similarity Advantage in Serial Recall.
Poster presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, ON
Acheson, D.J. and MacDonald, M.C. (2007).Phonological Similarity Effects in Verbal Working Memory and Language Production Tasks.
Poster presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA.
