Working Memory Capacity Dissociates Lexical and Sentential Context Effects

Petten, Cyma Van; Weckerly, Jill; McIsaac, Heather K.; Kutas, Marta

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00418.x

Cited by 86 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Both the empirical data and the simulations are thus an instantiation of Myerson et al's (1990) claim that cognitive slowing, even if it is a general phenomenon, will not affect all behaviors equally; more complex processes (context use, in this case) will be impaired by slowing to a greater degree than simpler processes (frequency use). These results are also broadly consistent with studies of individual differences in comprehension efficiency in young adults and children, where less skilled comprehenders (assessed by performance on comprehension or verbal working memory tests or both) show limited or slower use of contextual information relative to more efficient comprehenders (Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990;Merrill, Sperber, & McCauley, 1981;Pearlmutter & MacDonald, 1995;Van Petten, Weckerly, McIsaac, & Kutas, 1997).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

2006

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Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good context use in offline tasks, but only young adults demonstrated rapid use of context in cross-modal naming. A 3rd experiment demonstrated that younger and older adults had similar knowledge about the contexts used in Experiments 1 and 2. The experiment results were simulated in 2 computational models in which different patterns of context use were shown to emerge from varying a single speed parameter. These results suggest that age-related changes in processing efficiency can modulate context use during language comprehension.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

2006

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“…Patients with schizophrenia generated only very small late positivities, suggesting that they processed only the relationships among individual words (breakfast-eggs-eat), without creating a higher-level representation of the complete sentence. This pattern of results presents an intriguing parallel to that observed in healthy participants, in which those with high and low working memory capacity were equally sensitive to word-pair relationships within sentences, but the ERPs of low-capacity individuals showed little sign of sentence-level congruity effects (Van Petten et al, 1997).…”

Section: Neurocognitive Analyses Of Complex Symptomssupporting

confidence: 55%

“…Some aspects of verbal ability -particularly working memory capacity -have also been correlated with amplitudes and/or latencies of sentence-level N400s (Gunter et al, 1995;Van Petten et al, 1997;D'Arcy et al, 2005). Thus, it is also advisable to match groups on level of formal education.…”

Section: Page 18mentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related potentials in clinical research: Guidelines for eliciting, recording, and quantifying mismatch negativity, P300, and N400

Duncan

Barry

Connolly

et al. 2009

Clinical Neurophysiology

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845

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“…'The box is biting the mailman') individuals with low working memory spans elicit an N400 (reflecting lexical/semantic processing) while individuals with high working memory spans elicit a P600 (reflecting combinatorial processes). Similarly, Van Petten, Weckerly, McIsaac and Kutas (1997) showed that individuals with low working memory capacity were less able than individuals with medium or high working memory capacity to use sentence context to facilitate word integration (as indicated by N400 modulations), though they were equally good at using lexical relationships between words. Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals with low working memory capacity may be limited in their ability to interpret events in a discourse according to a counterfactual model of the world.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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Recent empirical research suggests that understanding a counterfactual event (e.g. 'If Josie had revised, she would have passed her exams') activates mental representations of both the factual and counterfactual versions of events. However, it remains unclear when readers switch between these models during comprehension, and whether representing multiple 'worlds' is cognitively effortful. This paper reports two ERP studies where participants read contexts that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, followed by a second sentence describing a consequence of this event.Critically, this sentence included a noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the preceding context, and either included a modal verb to indicate reference to the counterfactualworld or not (thus referring to the factual-world). Experiment 2 used adapted versions of the materials used in Experiment 1 to examine the degree to which representing multiple versions of a counterfactual situation makes heavy demands on cognitive resources by measuring individuals' working memory capacity. Results showed that when reference to the counterfactual-world was maintained by the ongoing discourse, readers correctly interpreted events according to the counterfactual-world (i.e. showed larger N400 for inconsistent than consistent words). In contrast, when cues referred back to the factual-world, readers showed no difference between consistent and inconsistent critical words, suggesting that they simultaneously compared information against both possible worlds. These results support previous dualrepresentation accounts for counterfactuals, and provide new evidence that linguistic cues can guide the reader in selecting which world model to evaluate incoming information against.Crucially, we reveal evidence that maintaining and updating a hypothetical model over time relies upon the availability of cognitive resources.

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Working Memory Capacity Dissociates Lexical and Sentential Context Effects

Cited by 86 publications

References 24 publications

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Event-related potentials in clinical research: Guidelines for eliciting, recording, and quantifying mismatch negativity, P300, and N400

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

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