The Investigation of Temporal Order in Language Learning Using Behavioural Tasks and MMN

Abstract

Short-term memory (STM) has demonstrated to be affected by serial order, involving the use of rhythm and entrainment to stimuli. However, less is known of the extent of this relationship and language learning, and the literature focuses on words rather than sentences. Moreover, the literature lacks an exploration of whether this relationship has a correlation with MMN responses. We had 30 participants (21 female) complete two sentence repetition tasks, a temporal rhythm accuracy task, and two temporal order judgment tasks. We also recorded the electroencephalograms (EEG) from 24 of the participants (17 female) while they listened to syllables differing by time of presentation and differing by consonant and vowel. We then correlated performance on these tasks to performance on a foreign-word learning (FWL) task. We hypothesized that the STM tasks would predict performance in the FWL task, and we explored whether temporal accuracy and word learning correlated with MMN responses to early stimuli. We found that only the foreign sentence repetition task significantly predicted performance in the FWL task. We also did not find any significant correlations with MMN responses and temporal accuracy and word learning abilities. Findings show that with previous exposure to a novel language, the prosodic pattern of the foreign language is stored temporarily in STM, which enhances learning of the foreign words. Further exploration is needed to understand the relationship of temporal order and language learning with cortical responses.