Individual differences in integrating information between and within sentences.

Abstract

Individual differences in working memory capacity affect the probability of resolving apparent inconsistencies as in There is a sewer near our home who makes terrific suits. Resolution was less likely for readers with small working memories, as assessed by the reading span test that taxes both processing and storage functions of working memory. The theory proposes that readers with small spans devote so many resources to reading processes that they have less capacity for retaining earlier verbatim wording in working memory. Readers with small spans had particular difficulty recovering from inconsistencies when a sentence boundary intervened, as in There is a sewer near our home. He makes terrific suits. This suggests that end-of-sentence processes taxed the poor reader more. Reading times were used to model the time course of integration. Detection and recovery increased processing time. Furthermore, detection was apparent on the first inconsistent word, suggesting that readers attempt to integrate a word immediately and do not buffer several words before processing them semantically. This article examines individual differences found a bat that was very large and brown and was flying in how readers integrate successive words into ba <* ^ f °rth '" the "to"* room -Now he dkta ' t need their current representation of a text. It focuses to ta 9fraid any longet on the role of working memory in integration Most readers initially interpret the ambiguous and how it interacts with the characteristics wor( j b at & "baseball bat" because this is the of the text being read. The integration pro-interpretation that was primed by the precedcesses were studied by embedding inconsis-j ng sentence. However, "baseball bat" is intencies in simple "garden path" passages such compatible with the subsequent phrase flying as the following:back and forth in the gloomy room, and the There was a strange noise emanating from the dark house, resolution requires a reinterpretation of bat to Bob had to venture in to find what was there. He was mean "a kind of animal." Such inconsistencies terrified; rumor had it that the house was haunted. He ma y be detected as soon as the reader attempts would feel more secure with a stick to defend himself and t mteg rate the new information, say flying, so he went and looked among his baseball equipment. He , . , T . " , ' ..£ which is semantically anomalous given the _.~ ~ r~~;7T. representation of the earlier text. To recoverThe research was supported in part by Natural Sciences .

Working memory for meaningless manual gestures.

“…One example is the reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980;Rönnberg, Arlinger, Lyxell & Kinnefors, 1989) which taps parallel storage and processing capacity by requiring participants to read and semantically process sentences while at the same time retaining their content in memory. However, when to-be-remembered items have no existing representations in long-term memory, another approach is needed; one candidate is the nback task (Cohen, Forman, Braver, Casey, Servan-Schreiber, Noll, 1994;Dahlin, Stigsdotter Neely, Larsson, Bäckman & Nyberg, 2008).…”

Surface information loss in comprehension

“…In reading-time experiments, sentences and words that changed the ongoing topic, point of view, or setting took substantially longer to comprehend than those that continued it (A. Anderson, Garrod, & Sanford, 1983;Daneman & Carpenter, 1983;Dee-Lucas, Just, Carpenter, & Daneman, 1982;Gernsbacher, 1984a;Haberlandt et al, 1980;Lesgold, Roth, & Curtis, 1979;Mandler & Goodman, 1982;Olson, Duffy, & Mack, 1980). This is the pattern expected if upon encountering these changes, subjects had difficulty mapping the incoming information onto the structure they were developing and, hence, broke off building one substructure and began another.…”

The Time Course of Anaphor Resolution: Effects of Implicit Verb Causality and Gender

“…There is abundant evidence that extra processing occurs at the ends of sentences, resulting in loss of verbatim information (Daneman & Carpenter, 1983;Jarvella, 1971;Just & Carpenter, 1980). Thus, the verbatim traces of potential antecedents may be weakened by the sentence boundary, making them less available to the anaphor resolution processes.…”