Field articulation and working memory

This experiment assessed the proposal that performance differences associated with field independence/field articulation reflect differential efficiency in the use of a limited capacity information-processing system termed working memory. Extreme scores on a group-administered version of the embedded figures test were used to identify subjects “high” and “low” in degree of field articulation. The task required that a subject retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. Concurrent information load on working memory was varied in two ways: by increasing memory load from 3 to 6 digits, and by increasing the complexity of the semantic processing required. In low information load conditions no differences were found between high FA and low FA groups. In high information load conditions low FA subjects made more errors in digit recall and took longer to perform the difficult semantic modification.     

Individual differences in cognitive style,working memory,and semantic integration

In two experiments subjects classified as being either high or low in field articulation (FA) performed a semantic integration task with high-information load. In Experiment 1, differences in performance between high- and low-FA subjects on an inference and recognition test were obtained when sentences were presented for 5 sec a piece but not when they were presented for 10 sec a piece. In Experiment 2, performance differences between high and low-FA subjects were eliminated by presenting only a specific subset of the sentences for 10 sec a piece. The implications of these results for explanations of FA effects in semantic integration are discussed.     

The role of working memory in inferential sentence comprehension

Existing literature on inference making is large and varied. Trabasso and Magliano (Discourse Process 21(3):255–287, 1996) proposed the existence of three types of inferences: explicative, associative and predictive. In addition, the authors suggested that these inferences were related to working memory (WM). In the present experiment, we investigated whether WM capacity plays a role in our ability to answer comprehension sentences that require text information based on these types of inferences. Participants with high and low WM span read two narratives with four paragraphs each. After each paragraph was read, they were presented with four true/false comprehension sentences. One required verbatim information and the other three implied explicative, associative and predictive inferential information. Results demonstrated that only the explicative and predictive comprehension sentences required WM: participants with high verbal WM were more accurate in giving explanations and also faster at making predictions relative to participants with low verbal WM span; in contrast, no WM differences were found in the associative comprehension sentences. These results are interpreted in terms of the causal nature underlying these types of inferences.     

Working memory in older subjects: Dealing with ongoing and stored information in language comprehension

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the role of aging in working memory (WM), or at least the part involved in language comprehension, e.g., a double function of processing the ongoing information and keeping in memory the product of this processing. Young and older subjects were asked to simultaneously detect incongruities in sentences and keep increasing longer series of words (3, 4, or 5) in memory. The difficulty of incongruity detection was manipulated by variation of the number of intervening words (0, 6, or 12) between two critical words. Incongruity detection was assumed to be linked to the processing of information function of working memory. The concurrent mnemonic load consisted of material previously processed, and was assumed to be linked to the storage function of WM. Results showed that an increment in incongruity-detection difficulty led to a greater decrement in accuracy in older than in young subjects, indicating an impairment in the information-processing function. On the other hand, an increment in concurrent mnemonic load led to a slightly smaller decrement in accuracy in older subjects. Furthermore, fewer words from this mnemonic load were recalled in older subjects. It is suggested that older subjects are impaired in coping with both requirements of the task, and tend to sacrifice the storage of information recently processed to devote their resources to the immediate processing component of the task. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for language comprehension.     

Bilingual working memory span is affected by language skill

A complex span procedure was used to study whether there is a measurable extra load on general working memory (WM) when a not fully automatised language has to be comprehended. Participants verified heard sentences in relation to simultaneously shown pictures and memorised the last word of each sentence. The sentences were presented in growing set sizes and recall of all the last words was required after each set. The largest number of sentences that could be processed in combination with successful recall of their last words determined the participant's WM span. Sentences were either in the participants' native language or a well-mastered second language, English. Participants were psychology and English students. WM span and decision accuracy were better for native-language than foreign-language sentences, especially for the psychology students. A second experiment ascertained that the difference between participant groups could not be explained by variables related to phonological shortterm memory or word processing. A third experiment controlled for systematic trade-off differences between languages and groups. We conclude that aspects of sentence comprehension in foreign language develop with practice so that they require less WM resources.     

Processing resource capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences

Three experiments explored the relationship between verbal working memory capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects with high, medium, and low working memory spans made acceptability judgments about garden path and control sentences under whole sentence and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) conditions. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the comprehension of garden path sentences in either condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, subjects with high and low working memory spans were tested on the same materials at three RSVP rates. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the magnitude of the effect of garden path sentences at any presentation rate. The results suggest that working memory capacity, as measured by the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading span task, is not a major determinant of individual differences in the processing of garden path sentences.     

Through the looking glass: Sex differences in memory for self-facial poses

This study investigated recognition memory of photographs of the subject's own face. Male and female subjects were photographed as they projected sociable faces, trustworthy faces, and intelligent faces. After deciding which face of 10 best represented each characteristic, and judging which photograph best represented their “real self,” a recognition memory test of poses was given. Half of each sex were tested under intentional learning conditions and the remainder were tested under incidental learning conditions. Females demonstrated superior recognition memory of their own facial projections and, in particular, recalled photographs of their “real self” and “most sociable” self most easily. No differences were found between the two learning conditions. Subjects' recognition performance was not related to their confidence of judgments. The results were discussed in terms of sex differences and the role of self in memory.     

Individual differences in working memory strategies for reading expository text

This study investigated whether individual differences in working memory (WM) span are associated with different WM management strategies during the reading of expository text. In Experiment 1, probe questions were presented on line during reading to determine whether thematic information was maintained in WM throughout comprehension. The data indicated that readers across the range of WM span maintained thematic information in WM throughout the reading of a given passage. In Experiment 2, sentence reading times and accuracy for both topic and detail questions were measured in two conditions: when topic sentences were present and when topic sentences were absent. Subjects performed similarly across the range of WM span in the topic-present condition, but lower span subjects performed more poorly on detail questions in the topic-absent condition. In Experiment 3, the topic-present condition of the second experiment was replicated, except that subjects expected to receive questions about details only. Thematic processing and retention of topic and detail information all increased with span. Taken together, these results suggest that, for more difficult text processing tasks, high- and low-span subjects adopt different WM management strategies and these strategies influence what is learned from reading the text.     

Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.     

The role of comprehension in children's observational learning of a syntactic rule

This experiment tested the hypothesis that there is a relationship between children's comprehension of a syntactic form and the effectiveness of modeling in promoting imitation of that form. Nursery and kindergarten children received pretests for both comprehension and production of reversible passive sentences. Children who produced no passive sentences were classified either as high, intermediate, or low comprehenders on the basis of their comprehension test performance. Within each of these three groups, children were randomly assigned either to a modeling or to a no-modeling control condition. Children in the treatment condition heard a model use passive sentences to describe a series of pictures. As predicted, the imitation post-test scores of these children were significantly related to their comprehension pretest scores. No significant relationship between the post-test scores and the comprehension scores of control subjects was detected. Children exposed to the model in all three comprehension groups received significantly higher post-test scores than did their respective counterparts in the no-modeling condition. These results are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that language learning proceeds from comprehension to imitation to production.     

Metaphoric comprehension: Studies in reminding and resembling

The theoretical problems posed by metaphoric comprehension are discussed in the context of experiments on prompted recall. Listeners heard sentences of the form “Topic is (like) Vehicle.” In most cases, a statement of the implicit resemblance (the “ground”) was very effective in prompting recall of its related metaphor. This result could not be attributed to the activation, transfer, or additive combination of pre-existing properties of the topic and vehicle terms or to pre-existing associations between grounds and sentence terms. It is argued that the vehicle domain guides a novel schematization of the topic domain, that the perceived resemblance is a higher-order relation among entities (both explicit and implicit) in each domain, and that this abstract relation constitutes the “functional memory unit.” Prompted recall may begin with recognition of this previously experienced relation.     

Sentence comprehension and working memory limitation in aphasia: a dissociation between semantic-syntactic and phonological reactivation

The relation between working memory (WM) limitation and sentence comprehension was assessed in Hebrew-speaking aphasics, three conduction aphasics and three agrammatics. The study compared sentences that required different types of reactivation-syntactic-semantic reactivation, in relative clauses, and word form/phonological reactivation, in sentences with reanalysis of lexical ambiguity. The effect of phonological memory load, manipulated by number of words intervening between the activation and the reactivation, on comprehension of the two sentence types was examined. The findings were that agrammatic aphasics failed in the comprehension of object relatives but not on subject relatives irrespective of their antecedent-gap distance. Conduction aphasics, on the other hand, who showed severe WM limitation, comprehended well all types of relative clauses and were unaffected by antecedent-gap distance. The conduction aphasics failed to understand the sentences that required phonological reactivation when the phonological distance was long. These results suggest that the type of reactivation required by the sentence, as well as the type of memory overload are crucial in determining the effect of WM limitation on sentence comprehension.     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

Interactive processes in sentence comprehension and recognition

Two experiments examined the roles played by semantic and surface information in reading and recognizing sentences. Subjects read sentences in normal and inverted typography. Their recognition of meaning and other sentence features was tested using sentences whose typography, wording, and/or meaning were either the same as or different from that in the first set of sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects either read aloud or performed a sentence continuation task. For originally inverted sentences, recognition of meaning was high, irrespective of task demands. For originally normal sentences, recognition was low for Read Aloud subjects and high for Sentence Continuation subjects. Sentence recognition was affected by repetition of wording and typography. Experiment 2 replicated the results with the read aloud task and showed the second reading of originally inverted sentences to be equally swift for paraphrase and verbatim test forms. It was concluded that reading and recognition are interactive processes, involving conceptually driven and data driven operations. The interaction of operations may be either automatic or controlled. While processing of normal typography is automatic, inverted typography induces controlled processing, resulting in better retention. Furthermore, semantic and surface information are conceptualized as interacting components of comprehension and memory processes.     

文本阅读中预期推理生成的容量制约性

本研究通过操纵读者信息加工的时间量考察了工作记忆容量对预期推理生成的影响性质。结果表明,如果没有信息加工时间的限制,则工作记忆容量低的读者也能表现出在阅读中生成预期推理的证据,而如果读者的阅读加工时间受一定限制,则工作记忆容量低者建构预期推理的证据随着被允许的加工时间的缩短而逐渐消失。结果支持“工作记忆容量只影响阅读中预期推理建构速度”的观点。     

Working memory capacity and individual differences in the making of reinstatement and elaborative inferences

This study investigated the role of working memory capacity on the making of reinstatement and causal elaborative inferences during the reading of natural texts. In order to determine participants' working memory capacity, they were asked to take the reading span task before they took part in the study. Those participants that were identified as high or low working memory capacity readers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in two conditions: pre-inference and inference. In the pre-inference condition, target words representing reinstatement or causal elaborative inferences were presented immediately before the sentences that were predicted to prompt them. In the inference condition, the target words were presented immediately after the sentences that were predicted to prompt the inferences. Results indicated that, for the high working memory capacity readers, lexical decision times were faster at the inference compared to the pre-inference locations for both types of inferences. In the case of low working capacity readers, lexical decision times were faster at the inference compared to the pre-inference locations only for reinstatement inferences. These findings suggest that working memory capacity plays a role in the making of causal inferences during the comprehension of natural texts.     

Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children

The language problems of reading-disabled elementary school children are not confined to written language alone. These children often exhibit problems of ordered recall of verbal materials that are equally severe whether the materials are presented in printed or in spoken form. Sentences that pose problems of pronoun reference might be expected to place a special burden on short-term memory because close grammatical relationships obtain between words that are distant from one another. With this logic in mind, third-grade children with specific reading disability and classmates matched for age and IQ were tested on five sentence types, each of which poses a problem in assigning pronoun reference. On one occasion the children were tested for comprehension of the sentences by a forced-choice picture verification task. On a later occasion they received the same sentences as a repetition test. Good and poor readers differed significantly in immediate recall of the reflexive sentences, but not in comprehension of them as assessed by picture choice. It was suggested that the pictures provided cues which lightened the memory load, a possibility that could explain why the poor readers were not demonstrably inferior in comprehension of the sentences even though they made significantly more errors than the good readers in recalling them.     

Some aspects of language comprehension in anterior aphasia

The competency of language comprehension was evaluated in three groups: anterior aphasics, posterior aphasics, and normal control subjects. Test material was divided into two sentence groups (Fill in the Blank and True/False) emphasizing either (1) semantic, “real world,” identity words or (2) syntactic, relational words, and one paragraph interpretation task. Matching auditory and visual (written) presentations were given. The control subjects performed almost flawlessly but many errors were made by each aphasia group. Qualitative study revealed a marked difference in the comprehension problem of the two groups. The anterior aphasic group performed well on semantically weighted sentences but made errors on syntactically weighted material, regardless of mode of presentation. In contrast, the posterior aphasics made almost the same number of errors on both types of material, regardless of mode of presentation. These findings support the concept of defective language comprehension in anterior aphasia and further suggest that the defect centers on the syntactical structures which are also poorly handled in expressive output.     

Relational processing and working memory capacity in comprehension of relative clause sentences

Previous research has indicated that the cognitive load imposed by tasks in various content domains increases with the complexity of the relational information processed. Sentence comprehension entails processing noun-verb relations to determine who did what to whom. The difficulty of object-extracted relative clause sentences might stem from the complex noun-verb relations they entail. Across three studies, participants read 16 types of object- and subject-extracted relative clause sentences at their own pace and then responded to a comprehension question for each sentence. Relational processing was assessed using a premise integration task or a Latin square task. These tasks predicted comprehension of object-relatives before and after controlling for subject-relatives. Working memory (WM) capacity was assessed using reading span or forward and backward digit span tests. WM tasks predicted comprehension of object-relatives before but not after controlling for subject-relatives. Comprehension of object-relatives relied more heavily on a domain-general capacity to process complex relations than on WM capacity.     

Memory-load interference in syntactic processing

Participants remembered a short set of words while reading syntactically complex sentences (object–extracted clefts) and syntactically simpler sentences (subject–extracted clefts) in a memory–load study. The study also manipulated whether the words in the set and the words in the sentence were of matched or unmatched types (common nouns vs. proper names). Performance in sentence comprehension was worse for complex sentences than for simpler sentences, and this effect was greater when the type of words in the memory load matched the type of words in the sentence. These results indicate that syntactic processing is not modular, instead suggesting that it relies on working memory resources that are used for other nonsyntactic processes. Further, the results indicate that similarity–based interference is an important constraint on information processing that can be overcome to some degree during language comprehension by using the coherence of language to construct integrated representations of meaning.