An investigation of maintenance mechanisms in working memory through phonological similarity and word length effects

While in Baddeley’s Working Memory model (Baddeley, 1986), the maintenance of verbal information depends on the availability of an articulatory rehearsal mechanism, within the Time-Based Resource-Sharing model (Barrouillet et al., 2007), it depends on an attentional refreshing mechanism, i.e. on the amount of attention available to refresh traces. The interplay of these two mechanisms, the articulatory rehearsal and the attentional refreshing, was investigated in two experiments, one in adults and one in 7-year-old children. In both experiments, within a complex span paradigm, the phonological similarity of the words to remember (similar vs dissimilar), the articulatory suppression (AS: no suppression vs suppression) and the attentional load of concurrent processing (no load vs location judgment task) were manipulated. Results replicated the classic effects of phonological similarity, AS, attentional load, and the interaction Similarity x AS. More interestingly, similarity and AS never interacted with attentional load. Such findings are in agreement with our claim of two independent mechanisms of maintenance for verbal information, namely articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, which could be separately or jointly involved in maintenance depending on situations.