![]() ![]() What determines the phonological memory capacity? One factor in particular-the structural knowledge of one’s language-has been linked to the efficiency with which the phonological memory system encodes information (e.g., Cheung, 1996 Harrington & Sawyer, 1992 Windsor, Kohnert, Lobitz, & Pham, 2010). However, there is remarkable variability in the population, with some individuals demonstrating high phonological memory capacity and others demonstrating low phonological memory capacity. The storage capacity of the phonological memory system is limited, and human beings can maintain only a few items in memory at any one time. This skill is imperative for performing complex linguistic tasks in both the native (L1) and the second (L2) language (e.g., Christoffels & de Groot, 2005), including auditory language comprehension (e.g., Smith, Mann, & Shankweiler, 1986) and written language processing (e.g., Daneman & Carpenter, 1980 Swanson & Berninger, 1995). Phonological memory is defined as the ability to maintain verbal information in memory for a brief period of time. Together, these results suggest that proficiency-based differences between monolingual and bilingual phonological memory performance depend on the degree to which the tasks rely on lexical-semantic knowledge and the difficulty level of the task. For the digit-span and nonword repetition tasks, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals at the easier levels of the tasks, but the differences between the two groups vanished with the increase in the difficulty levels. Results revealed that on the word-span task (highest level of lexical-semantic knowledge), monolinguals outperformed bilinguals at the easier levels of the task but bilinguals outperformed monolinguals at the more difficult levels of the task. We manipulated the degree to which the phonological memory tasks involved lexical-semantic knowledge of English (word-span task, digit-span task, and nonword repetition task), as well as the difficulty level of the tasks. All participants were tested on a range of phonological memory tasks in English. The monolingual English speakers were more proficient in English than the bilingual speakers. In the present study, we examined the effects of lexical-semantic knowledge and of difficulty level on phonological memory performance by monolingual adult English speakers and bilingual adult Korean–English speakers. ![]()
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