Toward an integrated account of working memory and language

Abstract

According to George Miller (1956), a pioneer of the “cognitive revolution”’ and proponent of the buzzword concept of the “magical number seven,” cognitive science in the modern sense had only started in the 1950s and gradually took shape in the mid-1970s. Based on Miller’s (2003) historical account, cognitive science as a scientific field of study originally comprised six core disciplines, spanning psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience, as well as anthropology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. Over the last half-century, cognitive scientists have probed into the underlying mechanisms and processes of human cognition, encompassing perception, attention, consciousness, reasoning, planning, learning, and memory, among many other topics. The six constituting disciplines have all flourished and complement each other, giving rise to a new set of interdisciplinary research agendas subsuming language acquisition and cognitive development, psycholinguistics and language processing, second language acquisition and bilingualism/multilingualism, and so forth. Meanwhile, the concept of working memory had also made its debut appearance some 60 years ago (Miller et al., 1960, p. 65). But then, with the advent of the seminal model of working memory by the British cognitive psychologists Baddeley and Hitch (1974), ensuing research enthusiasm into its nature, structure, and implications for essential facets of human cognition has grown exponentially. Expanding waves of research endeavors from laboratories across the Atlantic (Andrade, 2001) have given rise to the propagation of a multitude of theoretical perspectives and models of working memory (Baddeley, 2012; Conway et al., 2007; Cowan, 2017; Logie et al.,, 2021; Miyake & Shah, 1999). A majority of these influentialworking memory models are also featured in this current handbook, particularly in Part II, and they have been augmented with a particular focus on their unique ramifications for language acquisition and processing domains, as well as language impairments and intervention issues. Building on these emerging patterns and insights gleaned from strands of previous research, we aim, in this concluding chapter, to briefly summarize the progress that has been made in both working memory and language sciences, with a view to further aligning putative working memory components and processes with nuanced language acquisition domains and processing activities. These reviews then culminate in an integrated account of working memory and an operational taxonomy for its implementations in future language and bilingualism research. It is hoped that through such an integrated account, we will not just reflect on the fruitful results of previous and current endeavors by key laboratories and scholars in the multiple fields of cognitive science, but also will prompt new and upcoming researchers from different disciplines to collaborate and contribute to the “working memory-language” enterprise (Wen, 2016).