title: Verbal working memory and on-line syntactic processing: evidence from self-paced listening.
abstract: Two experiments investigated the relationship between performance on standard tests of verbal working-memory and the on-line construction of syntactic form. In Experiment 1, working-memory was measured in 100 college students on a version of the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading-span task, and online syntactic processing was assessed using a self-paced listening task with four sentence types. In Experiment 2, working-memory was measured in 48 college students on two versions of the reading-span task and two other tests of verbal working-memory, and on-line syntactic processing was assessed using the self-paced listening task with an additional sentence type. In both experiments, there was no relationship between working-memory capacity and the increase in processing time seen for the on-line construction of syntactic form for either syntactically more complex or syntactically simpler sentences. The results indicate that the capacity of the working-memory system that is measured by standard working-memory tests does not determine the efficiency of on-line syntactic processing. They are consistent with the view that the working-memory system used for parsing is at least partially separate from that measured by traditional measures of working-memory capacity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences, Boston University, MA 02215, USA. gwaters@bu.edu
authors.forename: Gloria S
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Waters
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Caplan
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary