ABSTRACT
The goal of this article is to present a theoretical view of the relationship among three cognitive capacities: Lexical processing, verbal short-term memory (STM), and the ability to learn new verbal material. We operationalise “lexical processing” to mean the processes that, during comprehension, map the phonological representation of a word onto its meaning, and that, during production, map a meaning onto a phonological representation to be produced in spoken form. We operationalise “verbal short-term memory” to mean the set of processing mechanisms that are invoked in performance of an immediate serial recall task. By “learning new verbal material,” we mean the learning of either a single new word, or a list (set) of new words.
