Individual differences in working memory and reading

Daneman, Meredyth; Carpenter, Patricia A.

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(80)90312-6

Cited by 5,314 publications

(5,165 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; Oberauer, Süß, Schulze, Wilhelm, & Wittmann, 2000) served as the measure of working memory capacity. The reading span task required the participants to read 84 unconnected sentences presented in blocks.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This prevented the participants from adopting a strategy that focused on the final words without devoting much attention to the reading of the sentence. It has been shown (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) that the reading span task is especially suitable to measure working memory as related to reading abilities because it requires text processing and storing. The reading span task was scored as recommended by Friedman and Miyake (2005) by averaging the proportion of correct words per block across all blocks.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Schreiner

Appel

Isberner

et al. 2017

Discourse Processes

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Stories are a powerful means to change people’s attitudes and beliefs. The aim of the current work was to shed light on the role of argument strength (argument quality) in narrative persuasion. The present study examined the influence of strong versus weak arguments on attitudes in a low or high narrative context. Moreover, baseline attitudes, interindividual differences in working memory capacity, and recipients’ transportation were examined. Stories with strong arguments were more persuasive than stories with weak arguments. This main effect was qualified by a two-way interaction with baseline attitude, revealing that argument strength had a greater impact on individuals who initially were particularly doubtful toward the story claim. Furthermore, we identified a three-way interaction showing that argument strength mattered most for recipients who were deeply transported into the story world in stories that followed a typical narrative structure. These findings provide an important specification of narrative persuasion theory.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Schreiner

Appel

Isberner

et al. 2017

Discourse Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Individual differences in working memory for language were assessed by subjects' performance on the reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). A subject's reading span is measured by the number of sentence-final words that can be retained while reading a set of sentences.…”

Section: Capacity Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Aphasic Sentence Comprehension as a Resource Deficit: A Computational Approach

1997

Self Cite

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“…So, it is not surprising that the mechanisms previously pinpointed are those specific to reading. However, when investigating comprehension skill among adults, one can go beyond those sources, because at an adult level of proficiency, skill at comprehending written language has been shown to be highly correlated with skill at comprehending spoken language (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980Jackson & McClelland, 1979;Perfetti & Lesgold, 1977;Sticht, 1972). Moreover, recently I (Gernsbacher, 1984b) found that skill in comprehending language stimuli (written and spoken) was highly correlated with skill in comprehending nonverbal stimuli (e.g., the picture stories used here).…”

Section: Surface Information and Comprehension Skillmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface information loss in comprehension

Gernsbacher

1985

Cognitive Psychology

202

185

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Shortly after a sentence has been comprehended, information about its exact surface form (e.g., its word order) becomes less available. The present research demonstrated this phenomenon during the comprehension of nonverbal stimuli (picture stories). In Experiment 1, significantly more surface (left/right orientation) information was lost after comprehending several picture stories than just one; in Experiment 2, more was lost after comprehending an entire picture story than half of one. In Experiment 3, subjects segmented the picture stories into their constituents; in Experiment 4, significantly more surface information was lost after crossing these constituents' boundaries than before. The present research also investigated why surface information is lost. Four explanations were considered: Surface information loss is the result of performing grammatical transformations (the linguistic hypothesis), exceeding short-term memory limitations (the memory limitations hypothesis), integrating information into gist (the integration hypothesis), shifting from building one substructure to initiating another (the processing shift hypothesis). The linguistic and memory limitations hypotheses were considered inadequate; the integration and the processing shift hypotheses were tested in the last set of experiments. In Experiment 5 (using nonverbal stimuli), the predictions made by the processing shift hypothesis were confirmed; in Experiment 6 (using verbal stimuli), these results were replicated. Other implications of the processing shift hypothesis concerning surface information loss are discussed.A well-known phenomenon involved in language comprehension is this: Shortly after a passage is comprehended, information about the exact surface form of its sentences (e.g., their word order) becomes less available. By far the most cited demonstration of this phenomenon is Sachs ' (1967). Her subjects listened to a narrative story that included a sentence such as 1. He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.After comprehending this sentence, subjects decided whether it or Sentence 2 was the sentence they just heard. 2A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.If subjects were tested immediately after hearing the target sentence, their ability to discriminate between it and its reversed form was around 90%. However, if they were tested after comprehending only 80 additional syllables, performance fell to just above chance.Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. M. A. Gernsbacher,

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Individual differences in working memory and reading

Cited by 5,314 publications

References 20 publications

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Aphasic Sentence Comprehension as a Resource Deficit: A Computational Approach

Surface information loss in comprehension

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