Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

On-line syntactic processing under concurrent memory load.

Gloria Waters1, David Caplan, Sasha Yampolsky

  • 1Department of Health Sciences, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. gwaters@bu.edu

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|May 16, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Treatment-induced neural reorganization in aphasia is language-domain specific: Evidence from a large-scale fMRI study.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior·2023
Same author

Structural disconnections associated with language impairments in chronic post-stroke aphasia using disconnectome maps.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior·2022
Same author

The Role of Working Memory, Short-Term Memory, Speed of Processing, Education, and Locality in Verb-Related Morphosyntactic Production: Evidence From Greek.

Frontiers in psychology·2022
Same author

Buildout and integration of an automated high-throughput CLIA laboratory for SARS-CoV-2 testing on a large urban campus.

SLAS technology·2022
Same author

Perilesional Perfusion in Chronic Stroke-Induced Aphasia and Its Response to Behavioral Treatment Interventions.

Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.)·2022
Same author

Multimodal Neural and Behavioral Data Predict Response to Rehabilitation in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia.

Stroke·2022
Same journal

Mind wandering during first- and foreign-language reading.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same journal

Lexical word processing is unaffected by rapid invisible frequency tagging in reading: Evidence from eye movements.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same journal

Anxiety modulates voluntary attentional orienting to emotional gaze cues: Eye movements for pro- and anti-saccades.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same journal

Faster key-press responses to front vowels than back vowels when matching heard vowels with represented vowels.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same journal

Testing the interleaving effect without response bias: A forced-choice reevaluation of Kornell and Bjork (2008).

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
Same journal

The impact of social interaction on abstract concepts.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026
See all related articles

Cognitive load does not impede syntactic processing. Working memory for syntax appears separate from general working memory, suggesting distinct cognitive resources for language comprehension.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Syntactic processing is crucial for language comprehension.
  • The role of working memory in syntactic processing is debated.
  • Understanding the separation of cognitive resources is key to cognitive architecture.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of concurrent memory load on syntactic processing.
  • To determine if working memory resources for syntax are distinct from those used in standard memory tasks.
  • To provide evidence for or against a separate working memory system for syntactic structure.

Main Methods:

  • A self-paced listening paradigm was used with 36 university students.
  • Participants completed a plausibility judgment task under no-interference and two-digit load conditions.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Listening times were measured at syntactically complex and simple sentence portions.

    • Main Results:

    • Listening times increased with syntactic complexity and concurrent memory load.
    • Increased memory load did not disproportionately affect listening times at complex syntactic positions.
    • No interaction was found between memory load and syntactic complexity in listening times.

    Conclusions:

    • Concurrent memory load does not deplete resources for on-line syntactic processing.
    • Evidence suggests a distinct working memory system for syntactic structure assignment.
    • Findings support a modular view of working memory in language comprehension.