Intersentential syntactic context effects on comprehension: the role of working memory

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Human Language Processing

Background:

• Individual differences in working memory significantly impact cognitive processes.
• Sentence complexity, particularly object-first structures, poses challenges for language comprehension.
• Syntactic context can facilitate or hinder the processing of complex grammatical constructions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how syntactic context affects the processing of object-first relative and complement clauses.
• To examine the role of working memory capacity in mediating the influence of syntactic context.
• To compare behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potentials/ERPs) responses between high and low working memory groups.

Main Methods:

• Participants were divided into high and low working memory span groups.
• Behavioral data were collected via a post-sentence comprehension question task.
• On-line event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, focusing on the P600 component at disambiguating regions.

Main Results:

• Low working memory readers showed context effects on object-first relative clause comprehension.
• High working memory readers exhibited a P600 effect for structure (subject- vs. object-first) independent of context.
• Low working memory readers did not display a significant P600 structure effect.

Conclusions:

• Working memory capacity modulates the use of intersentential syntactic context during sentence comprehension.
• High working memory individuals process complex sentences more autonomously, relying less on preceding context.
• Low working memory individuals appear to utilize off-line contextual information more extensively for sentence interpretation.