Rapid semantic effects in immediate serial recall? Online experiment with dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults

There are well-established links between long-term language knowledge and verbal short-term memory (vSTM) with varied evidence that available semantic information either directly or indirectly supports phonological maintenance (e.g. Savill et al., 2018). Furthermore, a relatively stronger influence on semantic knowledge in short-term memory has been observed when phonological abilities are relatively weak (Savill, Cornelissen, Whiteley, Woollams, & Jefferies, 2019; in line with a primary systems perspective, e.g. Ueno et al., 2014). In Kowialiewski and Majerus (2018), long-term linguistic effects on vSTM are mostly non-strategic as they arise in a fast encoding running span procedure that prevented strategic processes. However, when examining the semantic effect of imageability, researchers found that it only appeared under slower presentation rates that would therefore allow for strategic encoding of the words. Imageability effects have been found in relation to phonological skills under standard immediate serial recall conditions (lists presented at a rate of one item per second) (Savill et al., 2019). Considering that the typical verbal short-term memory deficit observed in dyslexic individuals has been suggested to be related to less efficient encoding strategies (Kramer, Knee, & Delis, 2000), the present study will investigate the nature of lexical-semantic effects under speeded conditions in dyslexic and non-dyslexic individuals, and will assess ISR performance under different semantic and lexical manipulations across two experiments (words imageability, semantic relatedness, lexicality). The first experiment will assess short-term recall performance in an immediate serial recall (ISR) task with lists of high and low imageability words as well as nonwords lists presented under slow and fast presentation rates. In the second experiment, ISR lists will either be semantically related or unrelated.