The nature of working memory capacity in sentence comprehension: Evidence against domain-specific working memory resources
- 作者：Evelina Fedorenko ; Edward Gibson and Douglas Rohde
- 关键词：Working memory ; Sentence comprehension ; Domain specificity
- 刊名：Journal of Memory and Language
- 出版年：2006
- 期刊代码：139_0749596x
- 类别：soc
- 出版时间：May 2006
- 卷：54
- 期：4
- 页码：541-553
- 文件大小：276 K
摘要
This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject- and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the sentence-nouns). A significant on-line interaction was found between syntactic complexity and similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns in the three memory-nouns conditions, such that the similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns affected the more complex object-extracted relative clauses to a greater extent than the less complex subject-extracted relative clauses. These results extend Gordon, Hendrick, and Levine’s (2002) report of a trend of such an interaction. The results argue against the domain-specific view of working memory resources in sentence comprehension (Caplan & Waters, 1999).