Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many theories of memory propose some type of short- term store limited in capacity to a small number of in- formation chunks. However, although short-term ver- bal memory is generally considered to be a crucial component of language processing, the relevant infor- mation chunk level that may de?ne capacity limits in ecologically-valid spoken language has never been inves- tigated. The Intonation Unit (IU), an intermediate-level prosodic phrase, has been theorized to be a fundamental unit of spoken language, the focus of a speaker's mental processing. This suggests that IUs might play a role as the relevant unit representing \chunks" of spoken lan- guage. We report the results of an experiment investi- gating the role of IUs in short-term memory in a serial recall task. We found a signi?cant non-linear e?ect of stimulus size in IUs, but not clauses. We conclude that Intonation Units are the primary linguistic unit used for chunking spoken language input in memory.