Is "working memory capacity" just another name for word knowledge?

Nations, John K.; Cantor, Judy

doi:10.1037//0022-0663.82.4.799

Journal of Educational Psychology

1990

DOI: 10.1037//0022-0663.82.4.799

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Is "working memory capacity" just another name for word knowledge?

John K. Nations¹,

Judy Cantor²

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On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

Kennette

Wurm

2014

Curr Psychol

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Most research supports a non-selective (or exhaustive) account of activation whereby multiple meanings of a word are initially activated (Degani and Tokowicz Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1266-1303, 2010. But what happens to the non-selected meaning of an ambiguous word (e.g., bark) and how is the decision made to select one meaning over the other? A great deal of research by Gernsbacher and colleagues (e.g., Gernsbacher and Faust 1991a) suggests that the nonselected meaning is "discarded" via active suppression. The present paper examines meaning-selection in ambiguous words using a word to elicit meaning context (rather than a sentence). Additionally, a manipulation of cognitive load (Experiment 2) was employed to examine these processes. Results support a suppression account of meaning selection. An updated conceptualization of ambiguity resolution is proposed.Humans use language in numerous ways and through multiple modalities with impressive efficiency. Sometimes, linguistic interactions are clear and result in effective communication, as intended by Grice (1975). Other times linguistic stimuli can be ambiguous. For example, in the absence of context, a word like bark might activate one of two very different concepts (related to either tree or dog). How is this type of ambiguity resolved? This question has prompted the present investigations.Although a large body of research already exists clarifying some aspects of the ambiguity resolution process, a much smaller body of research exists to explain how various cognitive contexts affect this process. There is empirical evidence of a small number of cognitive factors (such as reading ability (Gernsbacher and Robertson 1995)) affecting the ambiguity resolution process.Curr Psychol

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On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

Kennette

Wurm

2014

Curr Psychol

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Individual differences in syntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions?

James

Fraundorf

Lee

et al. 2018

Journal of Memory and Language

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There remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the fact that few psycholinguistic studies of individual differences include multiple constructs, multiple measures per construct, or tests for reliable measures. Here, we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional statistics, difficulty of object-versus subject-extracted relative clauses, and resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We examine whether any individual differences in these phenomena could be predicted by language experience or general cognitive abilities (phonological ability, verbal working memory capacity, inhibitory control, perceptual speed). We find correlations between individual differences and offline, but not online, syntactic phenomena. Condition effects on reading time were not consistent within individuals, limiting their ability to correlate with other measures. We suggest that this might explain controversy over individual differences in language processing.

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Is "working memory capacity" just another name for word knowledge?

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

Individual differences in syntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions?

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