TY - JOUR
T1 - Professional or amateur? The phonological output buffer as a working memory operator
AU - Haluts, Neta
AU - Trippa, Massimiliano
AU - Friedmann, Naama
AU - Treves, Alessandro
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors.
PY - 2020/6/1
Y1 - 2020/6/1
N2 - The Phonological Output Buffer (POB) is thought to be the stage in language production where phonemes are held in working memory and assembled into words. The neural implementation of the POB remains unclear despite a wealth of phenomenological data. Individuals with POB impairment make phonological errors when they produce words and non-words, including phoneme omissions, insertions, transpositions, substitutions and perseverations. Errors can apply to different kinds and sizes of units, such as phonemes, number words, morphological affixes, and function words, and evidence from POB impairments suggests that units tend to substituted with units of the same kind-e.g., numbers with numbers and whole morphological affixes with other affixes. This suggests that different units are processed and stored in the POB in the same stage, but perhaps separately in different mini-stores. Further, similar impairments can affect the buffer used to produce Sign Language, which raises the question of whether it is instantiated in a distinct device with the same design. However, what appear as separate buffers may be distinct regions in the activity space of a single extended POB network, connected with a lexicon network. The self-consistency of this idea can be assessed by studying an autoassociative Potts network, as a model of memory storage distributed over several cortical areas, and testing whether the network can represent both units of word and signs, reflecting the types and patterns of errors made by individuals with POB impairment.
AB - The Phonological Output Buffer (POB) is thought to be the stage in language production where phonemes are held in working memory and assembled into words. The neural implementation of the POB remains unclear despite a wealth of phenomenological data. Individuals with POB impairment make phonological errors when they produce words and non-words, including phoneme omissions, insertions, transpositions, substitutions and perseverations. Errors can apply to different kinds and sizes of units, such as phonemes, number words, morphological affixes, and function words, and evidence from POB impairments suggests that units tend to substituted with units of the same kind-e.g., numbers with numbers and whole morphological affixes with other affixes. This suggests that different units are processed and stored in the POB in the same stage, but perhaps separately in different mini-stores. Further, similar impairments can affect the buffer used to produce Sign Language, which raises the question of whether it is instantiated in a distinct device with the same design. However, what appear as separate buffers may be distinct regions in the activity space of a single extended POB network, connected with a lexicon network. The self-consistency of this idea can be assessed by studying an autoassociative Potts network, as a model of memory storage distributed over several cortical areas, and testing whether the network can represent both units of word and signs, reflecting the types and patterns of errors made by individuals with POB impairment.
KW - Cortex
KW - Latching dynamics
KW - Phonological output buffer
KW - Potts network
KW - Working memory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087670992&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/E22060662
DO - 10.3390/E22060662
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AN - SCOPUS:85087670992
SN - 1099-4300
VL - 22
JO - Entropy
JF - Entropy
IS - 6
M1 - 662
ER -