Working memory: what relevance does it have in learning process and in language processing ?

Abstract

This work consists of a systematic review of the literature on working memory.  Researches, including the ones developed by George Miller (1956) and Paul Carrillo-Mora (2010) have shown that working memory is involved in remembering visual and spatial information, as well as in cognitive activities and in planning strategies.  In the present article, we first examine some important facts in the history of research about working memory. After that, we analyze works published from 2001 to 2011 and available at the “Scientific Electronic Library Online”. During this process, we found studies about different aspects of working memory, but those related to language are usually focused on phonological aspects. There are some works about the relation between working memory and general aspects of intelligence, while others are about difficulties in learning and problems related to memory. We still do not have conclusive answers, in other words, the relation between problems in learning and working memory capacity is not widely accepted; however, there is a consensus that the amount of linguistic information we can keep in our working memory is influenced by spelling time and semantic similarity of the terms used. The studies analyzed here point to the same conclusions.