Journal Article10.1111/1467-9280.00475
Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing
TL;DR: 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.
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Abstract: Participants remembered a short set of words while read- ing syntactically complex sentences (object-extracted clefts) and syn- tactically 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. Fur- ther, the results indicate that similarity-based interference is an im- portant 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.
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The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
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The modularity of mind
Robert Cummins,Jerry A. Fodor +1 more
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TL;DR: The reading span, the number of final words recalled, varied from two to five for 20 college students and was correlated with three reading comprehension measures, including verbal SAT and tests involving fact retrieval and pronominal reference.
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A capacity theory of comprehension: individual differences in working memory.
TL;DR: A theory of the way working memory capacity constrains comprehension is proposed, which proposes that both processing and storage are mediated by activation and that the total amount of activation available in working memory varies among individuals.