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What is the role of working memory over the course of non-native speech category learning? Prior work is mixed with respect to the role of working memory in speech learning and has focused on how this important cognitive skill might influence learning accuracy assessed at a single timepoint. Here, we substantially extend this prior work by examining the role of working memory on learning performance over time (i.e., over several months) and leverage a multifaceted approach that provides key insights into how working memory influences learning accuracy, generalization ability, and decision processes. We find that in the initial and intermediate stages of learning, working memory is associated with higher accuracy, better generalization, and more efficient and cautious decision making. During a later stage of learning when learners approached stable performance, working memory was associated with better generalization and more efficient and cautious decision making, but no longer was related to accuracy. Working memory may enhance learning by facilitating rapid category acquisition in initial stages, enabling efficient and careful decision-making strategies that may reduce the effort needed to learn, and promoting flexible generalization to novel contexts. These results have important implications for developing interventions to improve learning in naturalistic language contexts. |
