Week 11: Memory Structure, Everyday Memory, and Speech Comprehension and Production

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards reviewing memory types, autobiographical memory phenomena, experimental paradigms, forgetting mechanisms, and speech comprehension and production processes based on lecture material.

Explicit memory

A form of long-term memory that an individual is consciously aware of and can explicitly describe or report.

Implicit memory

A form of long-term memory where knowledge is retained and expressed without conscious awareness, such as intuitive grammatical rules in language.

Episodic memory

Declarative long-term memory for personally experienced, temporally dated events ("knowing when") that provides a temporal scaffold for structuring recall.

Semantic memory

Declarative long-term memory for general knowledge, facts, and word meanings ("knowing what") that is organised by conceptual clusters rather than chronological time.

Retroactive interference

A form of forgetting where newly acquired information interferes with the retention and retrieval of previously learned, older material.

Distributed practice

A learning strategy that spaces repetitions or study sessions across time, demonstrated to produce superior semantic long-term retention compared to massed (clustered) practice.

Spreading activation

A retrieval mechanism in semantic network models (such as Collins and Loftus, 1975) wherein activating one concept node automatically triggers activation across related conceptual nodes.

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm

An experimental procedure in which participants study a themed list of words and consistently produce false memories for an unpresented central lure concept due to spreading activation.

Situated simulation theory

Barsalou's (2009) theory proposing that concrete concepts are grounded in perceptual and motor neural systems rather than stored solely as abstract, encyclopedic definitions.

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

An empirical curve describing the rapid initial loss of retained information followed by a leveling off, reaching an asymptote of approximately $20\%$ retention after $31$ days.

Encoding specificity principle

The principle stating that a retrieval cue only facilitates recall if information about its relationship to the target item was stored concurrently when the target item was encoded.

Context-dependent memory

The memory phenomenon shown by Godden & Baddeley (1975) where participants recalled roughly $50\%$ more words when the learning environment and testing environment matched (e.g., both dry land or both underwater).

Ecological validity

The degree to which experimental designs, tasks, and settings reflect and generalize to naturally occurring, real-world phenomena; characterized by Kvavilashvili & Ellis (2004) through generalisability and representativeness.

Earworms

Involuntary, spontaneously repeating musical memories that illustrate everyday memory phenomena that are difficult to reproduce under controlled laboratory conditions.

Autobiographical memory

Memory for events from an individual's own life history, differentiated from episodic laboratory memory by its explicit link to the self, extended temporal scope (decades), and integration with semantic knowledge.

Galton cueing technique

An autobiographical memory sampling method where participants are presented with prompt words (e.g., "river") and asked to retrieve an associated personal experience.

Reminiscence bump

The enhanced retention and recall of personal autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood observed in middle-aged and older individuals.

Life script theory

A retrieval-based account of the reminiscence bump proposing that culturally shared normative expectations regarding the timing of major transitional milestones facilitate the recall of important memories.

Narrative identity account

A goal-based account of the reminiscence bump proposing that memories from late adolescence and early adulthood are preferentially remembered because they correspond to the period when an individual identity is shaped.

Childhood amnesia

The inability of adults to retrieve autobiographical memories from before the age of $3$, alongside significantly fewer memories between ages $3$ and $6$.

Cognitive self theory

Howe & Courage's (1997) developmental theory stating that autobiographical memories can only be retained after a child develops a cognitive self (indexed by visual self-recognition) late in their second year of life.

Neurogenic hypothesis

Josselyn & Frankland's (2013) account proposing that high levels of neurogenesis in infancy disrupt enduring memory consolidation by replacing synaptic connections in existing hippocampal circuits.

Self-memory system (SMS)

Conway's theoretical model of autobiographical memory comprising the working self (goals and future states) and an autobiographical memory knowledge base organized hierarchically from themes down to event-specific knowledge.

Overgeneral memory

A memory retrieval tendency commonly seen in depressed individuals characterized by low autobiographical memory specificity and a reliance on high-level categorical summaries rather than specific episodic events.

Phonemes

The basic contrastive sound building blocks of spoken language, consisting of vowel and consonant categories that are perceived categorically.

McGurk effect

An auditory illusion demonstrating cross-modal speech perception, where mismatched visual lip movements alter the auditory phoneme that an individual consciously perceives (e.g., visual 'fa' combined with auditory 'ba').

Phonemic restoration effect

A top-down auditory phenomenon described by Warren (1970) where listeners mentally reconstruct missing speech sounds obscured by extraneous noise using semantic and syntactic context.

Cohort model

A model of spoken word perception proposing that an initial speech sound activates a cohort of potential word candidates in long-term memory, which narrows down as subsequent phonemes are heard.

Metrical segmentation

A bottom-up speech segmentation strategy in English where listeners rely on the stress pattern of words, assuming content words typically start with a strong syllable followed by a weak syllable.

Transitional probability

The statistical probability that one specific syllable will follow another in a spoken language, providing a bottom-up cue for discovering word boundaries in continuous speech.

Mondegreen

A misheard word or phrase resulting from erroneous top-down segmentation of continuous speech (e.g., misinterpreting 'and laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen').

Mental lexicon

The internalized cognitive dictionary in semantic memory that stores knowledge about words, including pronunciation, frequency of use, syntactic role, and polysemy.

Broca's aphasia

A neuropsychological language deficit characterized by halting, telegraphic, and non-fluent speech production, accompanied by relatively intact semantic comprehension.

Wernicke's aphasia

A language deficit marked by fluent, effortless speech that lacks coherent meaning ("word salad") and is accompanied by severe impairments in speech comprehension.

Perceptual-loop theory

Levelt's (1983) model of speech self-monitoring asserting that speakers monitor and evaluate their speech both internally (inner loop) and externally (outer loop) using the standard language comprehension system.

Serial account of speech production

A multi-stage model of speech generation progressing sequentially from conceptualisation and syntactic framing, to content word insertion, bound morpheme addition, function word integration, and finally overt articulation.