Role of Working Memory in Language Comprehension

摘要

This chapter provides an account of the transient computational and storage demands that typically arise during comprehension, and of the information management policies that attempt to satisfy those demands. The chapter describes a number of recent studies that examine the trading relation between computation and storage in working memory during language comprehension. Comprehension processes tends to minimize storage requirements by minimize the number of partial products that have to be stored. The minimization is accomplished by immediately digesting as much of the information from the text as possible (what we have called the immediacy of processing), rather than using a 'wait-and-see' strategy. A second focus is on the differences among individuals in their ability to maintain information in working memory during comprehension. We have that such individual differences in working memory capacity are closely related to large and stable individual differences in reading comprehension ability.