Language and memory 

By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban

“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously…”

Julio Cortázar, Argentine author of novels

In daily interaction, we are thrown into the rodeo of language and memory—their words and phrases, their contexts and associations, and their pressures and limitations. We turn captives of memory constrains and language processing mechanisms. How does language relate to memory?

Consider the following:

1- Miss not did party I the make dish. 

2-The train missed me and the dish party didn’t make it to me.

3- I missed the train and didn’t make it to the dish party.

Immediately after reading or hearing the previous combinations or groups, which of them would you remember most? Definitely, it is the last one. People can remember sentences better than unstructured strings.  Why? For two basic reasons. The first one is that sentence (3) has grammar; it is made up of well-arranged word strings attached together. In other words, its syntax or word order is in line with English grammar. The second reason is that the sentence makes sense as a result of the combination of the lexical meaning of its words and the meaning of the sentence as a whole created by grammatical organisation of words in units. Although the string of words in (2) has grammar, in that it is made up of two clauses, each starts with a subject, then a verb, then a complement, the string is anomalous, it is semantically weird. Thus we remember strings which are both grammatically and semantically plausible. 

Grammar is made up of two main components. One is word order which tells about grammatical relations between words and phrases; we know through word order who does what to whom. The second component is the addition of markers (suffixes indicating number and gender, as well as function words such as prepositions, articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, etc. indicating tense, aspect, mood, etc.

Grammatical knowledge is unconscious.

The psycholinguist Dan Slobin points out that syntax which is that part of grammar concerned with how words are put together to create massages, offers strong evidence in support of the productivity or creativity of human language. We may not create new words but we constantly create new sentences, employing a limited number of grammatical rules. How many times have you read or heard the following sentences?

 5- Flying to Mars is the best way to create jobs.

6- Genetic engineering services will be available to anyone on the nearby planets.

7- The latest models of the flying cars managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean within minutes.

Most probably, this is the first time to encounter such sentences. Their words are not new, but they are novel structures. This innate faculty of linguistic intuition or knowledge or competence to understand novel structures based on a limited number of grammatical ( syntactic and morphological) rules is simply what we mean by grammar. 

 To test the psychological reality of syntactic structures experimentally, Fodor and Bever (1965) asked a number of people to listen to sentence (8), which is made up of two phrases. 

8- That he was happy was evident from the way he smiled. 

The proper position for syntactically chunking or breaking the above sentence is between “happy” and “was”. During the experiment, participants heard clicks in various places before and after the proper boundary. Asked when they heard the clicks, the majority of participants mentioned that they heard the clicks at the syntactic break or boundary between “happy” and “was”, which means that phrases are mental units, and that what we really hear is an incredible mix of incoming signals and things we store in our memory.   

Fading away rapidly

Memory limitations, sleep deprivation and fatigue affect our linguistic performance considerably. Short term memory STM has limited duration between 15 and 30 seconds, and limited capacity of about 7 items. It stores small bits of information for a while and then they fade away rapidly. In STM, only surface structure is processed. Then the underlying structure or meaning are computed in the working memory.

 In sentence recall tests, it has been found that immediately after a while, we forget the exact words of the sentence but we remember very well its overall meaning, we can paraphrase and summarise it, which means that we store meaning and form in different places in the memory.

Cognitive burden

More interestingly, memorising a sentence with more than two relative clauses proves so difficult, as this represents a cognitive burden on our memories. Passive and negative sentences, being wordy expressions and requiring additional cognitive efforts, are more difficult to remember than affirmative active ones.

 These are few wondrous aspects of the relation between memory and language. It is the tip of an iceberg that is waiting for many explorers. 

By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban

Professor of linguistics

Faculty of Arts 

Kafr el-sheikh University

Email: [email protected]