Imagine your brain is a treasure chest filled with memories. But how does it organize all the information about language? Scientists have long believed that both procedural and declarative memory systems are involved in language learning, use, and knowledge. They thought that declarative memory held the unique words we know, while procedural memory handled the rules of grammar. Well, a recent study challenged this idea and found that the relationship between language and memory is more complex than we thought! The researchers looked at the processing of different linguistic aspects, like morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics, in Polish speakers. They discovered that our brains do have separate areas for vocabulary and grammar, but they’re not completely distinct. Instead, they lie on a continuum from rule-based to idiosyncratic. These findings have big implications for how we understand memory and language. We need to rethink our models and design new studies to explore this fascinating connection further! Curious to learn more? Check out the full article in the link below!

Abstract
Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory handling idiosyncratic lexical knowledge and procedural memory handling rule-governed knowledge of grammar.
We experimentally contrast the processing of morphology (case and aspect), syntax (subordination), and lexical semantics (collocations) in a healthy L1 population of Polish, a language rich in form distinctions. We study the processing of these four types under two conditions: a single task condition in which the grammaticality of stimuli was judged and a concurrent task condition in which grammaticality judgments were combined with a digit span task. Dividing attention impedes access to declarative memory while leaving procedural memory unaffected and hence constitutes a test that dissociates which types of linguistic information each long-term memory construct subserves.
Our findings confirm the existence of a distinction between lexicon and grammar as a generative, dual-route model would predict, but the distinction is graded, as usage-based models assume: the hypothesized grammar–lexicon opposition appears as a continuum on which grammatical phenomena can be placed as being more or less “ruly” or “idiosyncratic.” However, usage-based models, too, need adjusting as not all types of linguistic knowledge are proceduralized to the same extent. This move away from a simple dichotomy fundamentally changes how we think about memory for language, and hence how we design and interpret behavioral and neuroimaging studies that probe into the nature of language cognition.

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