Articulatory rehearsal

Articulatory rehearsal is the subvocal, motor-like repetition of verbal material that maintains phonological representations in the phonological loop of working memory. It is the active component of a feedback system: silent speech production feeds back into auditory and speech-motor cortices, sustaining an activation pattern that would otherwise dissipate. What is traditionally called "rehearsal" is not a copying process that refreshes a separate store. It is the dynamical engine that keeps the loop in motion.

The standard view, derived from Baddeley and Hitch's multicomponent model, separates the phonological store from the rehearsal process. This separation is a useful pedagogical device but a misleading ontology. In a neuroscience informed by dynamical systems theory, there is no store distinct from the process that maintains it. The activation pattern sustained by articulatory rehearsal is the memory. Stop the rehearsal, and the pattern collapses — as demonstrated by articulatory suppression.

The connection to speech production is intimate: articulatory rehearsal recruits the same motor programs and neural circuits that are used in overt speech, only without the final phonation. The motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the basal ganglia all participate in this silent rehearsal, blurring the boundary between perception and action, between memory and motor control.

Articulatory rehearsal is not a mnemonist's trick for keeping a phone number in mind. It is the voice of the dynamical system speaking to itself, and when it falls silent, the memory goes with it.