Abstract

Mounting evidence from both cognitive and neuropsychological research points to the importance of conceptual and lexical-semantic contributors to short-term memory performance. Nonetheless, a standardized and well-controlled measure to assess semantic short-term memory was only recently developed for English-speakers, and no parallel measure exists for Spanish-speakers. In the conceptual replication and extension reported here, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of short-term memory. Two versions of the task were validated, the Clustered and the Non-Clustered Conceptual Span task, both in separate samples of 64 and 105 Spanish-speaking university students. We found that both versions of the Conceptual Span task correlate well with another widely used standardized measure of working memory capacity, the Reading Span task. The two versions also correlated, as expected, with discrimination of linguistic congruency as assessed by a semantic anomaly judgment task. Clustered Conceptual Span remained a significant predictor of Reading Span when controlling for several additional cognitive variables, including fluid reasoning, text comprehension, verbal fluency, ideational fluency, and speed of processing. Our results present evidence that the Spanish adaptation of both versions of the Conceptual Span task can yield reliable estimates of the active maintenance of semantic representations in verbal working memory–an under-investigated ability that is involved in diverse domains such as episodic memory retrieval, language processing, and comprehension. Thus, the Conceptual Span task validated here can be employed to predict individual variation in semantic short-term memory capacity in a broad range of research domains.

Highlights

  • Short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) are fundamental contributors to human cognition, playing a key role in countless aspects of cognitive functioning and general intelligence

  • In the research reported here, in a conceptual replication and extension of previous work, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of STM

  • To facilitate across-study comparisons and given that the Conceptual Span task is analogous to the partial report task [46], we used the same method as earlier adopted by Haarmann and his colleagues [3] to obtain an estimated assessment of semantic STM capacity

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Summary

Introduction

Short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) are fundamental contributors to human cognition, playing a key role in countless aspects of cognitive functioning and general intelligence. Developing the conceptual span task in Spanish represent—and maintain—semantic or conceptual information in short-term memory. This comparative lack of attention has persisted despite increasing evidence of the importance of semantic short-term memory in such diverse domains as language processing and comprehension, analogical thinking, immediate recognition, and episodic memory retrieval. In the research reported here, in a conceptual replication and extension of previous work, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of STM

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