Chapter 10. Working memory capacity and narrative 
task performance

‘One Task Fits All’? The Roles of Task Complexity, Modality, and Working Memory Capacity in L2 Performance

“…These results do not align with Niwa (2000) but are partially compatible with Kormos & Trebits (2011), who found that WMC was positively correlated with some dimensions of syntactic complexity in speaking tasks. However, Kormos and Trebits did not identify any differences based on task complexity.…”

“…That is, differences in cognitive abilities, such as WMC as considered here, should help account for performance variance in more cognitively complex tasks. Although this prediction has been tested in several studies with regard to affective factors (e.g., Révész, 2011), to date only two studies have examined the extent to which WMC may mediate the link between task complexity and L2 output (Kormos & Trebits, 2011;Niwa, 2000). Niwa (2000) reported that fluency was negatively affected among higher WMC learners in the context of more complex oral narrative tasks.…”

The Role of Task Complexity, Modality, and Aptitude in Narrative Task Performance

“…For this purpose we administered the Hungarian version of a language aptitude test and two oral and written tasks to 44 upper‐intermediate learners of English in a Hungarian secondary school. Most studies examining the subtle effects of task characteristics on L2 output conclude that in addition to general measures of L2 production, task‐specific measures of production reveal more precise information about how tasks can direct learners’ attention to certain linguistic forms and how IDs may differentiate the ways in which learners can benefit from the manipulation of certain task features (e.g., Kormos & Trebits, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009; Robinson, 2007b). Therefore, in our study we used both general and specific measures of performance in analyzing students’ output.…”

“…She explained her findings by arguing that students with high working memory capacity made greater efforts to meet the reasoning and linguistic demands of the more complex task, which negatively affected their fluency. Kormos and Trebits (2011) also studied the effects of working memory capacity on performance on the same narrative tasks as used in the current study. The finding that students with high working memory capacity produced long clauses, which were, however, syntactically less complex indicated that working memory plays a complex role in task performance.…”

Weighing up the Effects of Working Memory and Cognitive Abilities in CLIL Learning

“…The cognitive factor investigated in the present study, working memory, has been found to be a robust predictor of second language learning (for recent reviews, see Wen, 2016;Wen et al, 2017;Singleton, 2017), above all in studies on vocabulary and grammar learning (Sanz, Lin, Lado, Stafford & Bowden, 2014). However, few studies (Gilabert & Muñoz, 2010;Guara-Tavarés, 2013;Kormos & Safar, 2008;Kormos, 2012b;Kormos & Trebits, 2011;Mota, 2003;Tagarelli, Ruiz, Moreno & Rebuschat, 2016;Zalbidea, 2017) have examined the relationship between working memory and different dimensions of language performance, namely, complexity (both structural and lexical), accuracy and fluency (henceforth, CAF). Furthermore, these studies have come to mixed results, as will be discussed in more detail below, and they often address only one or two dimensions, with only some studies including the four dimensions of linguistic performance.…”