Reexamining the relationship between working memory and comprehension: The role of available long-term memory

Was, Christopher A.; Woltz, Dan J.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.07.008

Cited by 58 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…Variants of all three contentembedded tasks have been used in previous research (Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle, 2002;Kyllonen & Christal, 1990;Was & Woltz, 2007;Woltz, 1988).…”

Section: Content-embedded Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although both content-embedded tasks (e.g., Was & Woltz, 2007) and complex span tasks (e.g., Engle, Carullo, & Collins, 1991) correlate with measures of comprehension, complex span tasks have been the WM measure of choice. Indeed, the volume of studies that have examined associations between complex span tasks and comprehension is too vast to be summarized here (for recent reviews, see Carretti, Borella, Cornoldi, & De Beni, 2009;Daneman & Merikle, 1996;Unsworth & Engle, 2007b), whereas Was and Woltz reported the only prior study to examine the association between content-embedded tasks and comprehension.…”

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Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

et al. 2011

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Discourse comprehension requires one to process information that is actively maintained in working memory (WM). Therefore, we hypothesized that individual differences in comprehension would be predicted better by working memory tasks that capture the concurrent demands of processing and maintenance of the same memory elements (i.e., content-embedded tasks) than by WM tasks that require the maintenance of an extraneous memory load during processing (e.g., complex span tasks). Two hundred sixty-one undergraduates completed three content-embedded tasks, three complex span tasks, and three measures of comprehension. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that the content-embedded tasks accounted for a greater amount of variance in comprehension than did complex span tasks. Thus, tasks that require one to coordinate the processing and maintenance of task-specific memory elements are preferable for capturing the relationship between WM and comprehension.Keywords Working memory . Complex span . Comprehension . Structural equation modelingText processing is a highly complex cognitive task in that its successful completion depends on the coordinated processing and maintenance of several different kinds of information, including words and the concepts they denote, the syntactic and semantic relationships between words within a sentence, the semantic relationships between ideas within and between sentences, and general world knowledge. Indeed, a widespread assumption among contemporary models of text comprehension is that successful comprehension depends heavily on the effective use of limited working memory (WM) resources (e.g., Goldman, Varma, & Coté, 1996;Graesser, Gernsbacher, & Goldman, 2003;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Kintsch, 1998;Perfetti, 1988;van den Broek, 2010).Consistent with this assumption, research has repeatedly demonstrated that individual differences in WM predict variance in comprehension. The most common approach to measuring WM has involved complex span tasks (see Conway et al., 2005;Kane et al., 2004). For example, Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) original reading span (RSPAN) task required participants to read a series of unrelated sentences aloud, after which they were asked to recall the last word of each sentence. Given concerns that sentence-final words were being generated from recall of the gist of the sentence, rather than from maintenance in working memory (Conway et al., 2005), more recent versions of the RSPAN task typically present an unrelated target (e.g., a word or letter) after each sentence to be maintained for subsequent recall after the end of the sentence set. The operation span (OSPAN) task is conceptually similar, requiring the processing of arithmetic equations along with maintenance of unrelated targets that follow each equation. More generally, complex span measures include both processing and maintenance task components. Of greatest interest for present purposes, a key feature of these measures is that the content to be processed and the content to be maintained...

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“…Variants of all three contentembedded tasks have been used in previous research (Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle, 2002;Kyllonen & Christal, 1990;Was & Woltz, 2007;Woltz, 1988).…”

Section: Content-embedded Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

et al. 2011

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“…Although these have been primarily examined in the context of reading comprehension, recent studies indicate that these language and cognitive skills are also related to children's listening comprehension. Evidence includes working memory (Florit et al, 2009(Florit et al, , 2013Kim, 2016 ;Was & Woltz, 2007 ), vocabulary (Florit et al, 2009 ;Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2014 ;Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White, & van den Broek, 2008 ;Kim, 2016 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 ), grammatical knowledge (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999 ;Kim, 2015Kim, , 2016Tunmer, 1989 ), inference (Florit et al, 2014 ;Kendeou et al, 2008 ;Kim, 2016 ;Lepola et al, 2012 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 ), theory of mind (Kim, 2015(Kim, , 2016Kim & Phillips, 2014 ) and comprehension monitoring (Kim, 2015 ;Kim & Phillips, 2014 ). It is of note that these theoretical models assume that the same processes are hypothesized to be involved in text comprehension across languages.…”

Section: Component Skills Of Listening Comprehension: Empirical Evidementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A downside of this approach (examining unique contributions using multiple regression) is that indirect contributions of potentially very important skills are easily masked. For instance, working memory has been hypothesized to be important to listening comprehension (Daneman & Merikle, 1996 ;Graesser et al, 1994 ;Kintsch, 1988 ;van den Broek et al, 2005 ) and empirical evidence supports this hypothesis (Florit et al, 2009(Florit et al, , 2013Was & Woltz, 2007 ). Then, is its infl uence on listening comprehension direct or is its infl uence partly or completely mediated by other skills that have been shown to be important to listening comprehension such as vocabulary and inference (e.g., Florit et al, 2014 ;Kendeou et al, 2008 ;Lepola et al, 2012 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 )?…”

Section: Component Skills Of Listening Comprehension: Empirical Evidementioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Listening Comprehension and What Does It Take to Improve Listening Comprehension?

Kim

Pilcher

2016

Literacy Studies

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One's ability to listen and comprehend spoken language of multiple utterances and oral texts (i.e., listening comprehension) is one of the necessary component skills in reading and writing development. In this chapter, we review theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence of listening comprehension development and improvement. A review of correlational and intervention studies indicates that many language and cognitive skills contribute to listening comprehension, including working memory, attention, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, inferencing, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring. Although limited in number, studies indicate that these skills are malleable. We conclude that listening comprehension instruction should be an integral part of reading and writing instruction, incorporating these multiple language and cognitive skills. Instruction on these components can be incorporated into existing instruction such as bookreading or reading comprehension instruction.

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“…One important difference between Ericsson and Kintsch's (1995) theory and other LTM storage-based WM models (e.g., Unsworth and Engle's [2007] theory, Cowan's [1995] "virtual short-term memory," or Was and Woltz's [2007] "available long-term memory") is the hypothesis that the ability to use LTM encoding and retrieval in WM tasks is a function of one's expertise in a given domain and task. More specifically, only when specific cognitive structures-retrieval structures-have been built up through practice can new information be transferred rapidly and reliably into LTM (for physiological evidence, see Guida, Gobet, Tardieu, & Nicolas, 2012; for theoretical considerations, see Ericsson & Kintsch, 2000;Gobet, 2000aGobet, , 2000b.…”

Section: The Long-term Working Memory Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of long-term working memory through personalization applied to free recall: Uncurbing the primacy-effect enthusiasm

et al. 2013

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In this study, a personalization method (Guida, Tardieu, & Nicolas, European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 21: 862-896 2009) was applied to a freerecall task. Fifteen pairs of words, composed of an object and a location, were presented to 93 participants, who had to mentally associate each pair and subsequently recall the objects. A 30-s delay was introduced on half of the trials, the presentation rate was manipulated (5 or 10 s per item), and verbal and visuospatial working memory tests were administered to test for their effects on the serial curve. Two groups were constituted: a personalized group, for whom the locations were well-known places on their university campus, and a nonpersonalized group, for whom the locations did not refer to known places. Since personalization putatively operationalizes long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, Psychological Review, 102: 211-245 1995)-namely, the capacity to store information reliably and rapidly in long-term memory-and if we take a dualstore approach to memory, the personalization advantage would be expected to be greater for pre-recency than for recency items. Overall, the results were compatible with long-term working memory theory. They contribute to validating the personalization method as a methodology to characterize the contribution of long-term memory storage to performance in working memory tasks.Keywords Working memory . Long-term working memory . Personalization . Free recall As has been stated by Rose, Myerson, Roediger, and Hale (2010), recent influential theories of working memory (WM) have been built around the link between long-term memory (LTM) and WM, postulating that WM is the activated portion of

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Reexamining the relationship between working memory and comprehension: The role of available long-term memory

Cited by 58 publications

References 62 publications

Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

What Is Listening Comprehension and What Does It Take to Improve Listening Comprehension?

The effect of long-term working memory through personalization applied to free recall: Uncurbing the primacy-effect enthusiasm

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