The nature of working memory operation during the comprehension of unambiguous, complex sentences Public Deposited

Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 22, 2019
Creator
  • Johnson, Marcus
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Abstract
  • The current studies, using eye-tracking methodology, sought to investigate the notion that processing difficulty may occur when reading sentences in which two or more noun phrases are encountered before they are integrated with verbs. This difficulty may be alleviated if the noun phrases are sufficiently dissimilar. Relative clauses (RC) and clefts, which can present readers with two or more noun phrases before the verbs which integrate them into the rest of sentence, were used to test this notion. Evidence for increased processing difficulty was found in Experiments 1 and 2 when two similar, but not dissimilar noun phrases were encountered before any verbs. Additionally, Experiment 3 utilized concurrent load methodology to test the possibility that the working memory responsible for language comprehension is modularized from general working memory. Experiment 3 provided evidence in support of similarity-based working memory and in opposition to the notion of modularized language comprehension working memory.
Date of publication
DOI
Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Gordon, Peter
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language
Access
  • Open access
Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
The nature of working memory operation during the comprehension of unambiguous, complex sentences 2019-04-11 Public