Working Memory and Its Constraints on Colometry

Abstract

is a cognitive system that provides temporary storage of information necessary to perform a wide range of tasks, including natural language use (comprehension, production and discourse recall), reasoning, learning, recognition of declarative and skill acquisition. This system has been the object of major research since the revolution of cognitive science in the 1950s, when it was regularly referred to as short-term memory or immediate memory !. Unlike the long-term storage capacity of our permanent memory, working can only store a limited amount of information and keep that information ac tive for a brief time without constant rehearsal. Both limitations have profound implications for our understanding of the performance con ditions governing Greek choral lyric and its colometry. Unfortunately, the vital new discipline of cognitive poetics has largely escaped the notice of classical scholars, and of our modern me tricians in particular, who seem to think that the responding periods of choral poetry march out of a text in blind obedience to phonological rules that bear no relationship to cognition. Virtually all the schemes of metrical scansion that have followed from the work of August Boeckh nearly two centuries ago represent a visual mechanization of rhythm that operates in direct contradiction to what we now know about cognitive science in general and working in particu lar.