Attention, working memory, and grammaticality judgment in typical young adults

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Neuroscience

Background:

• Auditory distraction is known to impact cognitive tasks.
• Its specific effects on sentence processing, particularly grammaticality judgment (GJ), require further investigation.
• Understanding resource allocation during language comprehension is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how auditory distraction affects sentence processing during grammaticality judgment.
• To examine the influence of semantic (reversibility) and short-term memory demands on this effect.
• To explore the interplay between distraction type and sentence characteristics.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted with young adult females.
• Experiment 1 involved a whole-sentence GJ task under varying auditory conditions (Quiet, Noise, Talk).
• Experiment 2 utilized a self-paced reading GJ task with similar sentence materials.

Main Results:

• Auditory distraction, particularly narrative talk, led to faster response times in GJ.
• Sentences with higher memory (longer) or semantic (reversible) loads generally slowed reaction times (RTs).
• The impact of distraction was less pronounced in the more deliberate self-paced reading task.

Conclusions:

• Auditory distraction can accelerate, rather than impede, grammaticality judgment.
• Sentence-level factors like memory and reversibility independently slow processing.
• The cognitive load and task explicitness moderate the effects of auditory distraction on sentence processing.