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Individual Differences in Sentence Processing: Effects of Verbal Working Memory and Cumulative Linguistic Knowledge

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Processing and Producing Head-final Structures

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 38))

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Abstract

The present study investigates individual differences in sentence processing. The Verbal Working Memory (VWM) model and the Two Factor Model, involving VWM and Cumulative Linguistic Knowledge (CLK), are compared in three self-paced reading experiments, in which ditransitive sentences containing high/low-frequency words (Exp. 1) and canonical/scrambled transitive verb sentences (Exp. 2, Exp. 3) are presented. Results favor the Two Factor model over the VWM model: the contributions of VWM and CLK to sentence processing are independent of each other. Two types of demands on VWM, temporal syntactic ambiguity and filler-gap dependency, are mediated by readers’ VWM capacity in scrambled sentences. CLK mediates lexical frequency effect and structural frequency effect on reading time and comprehension accuracy. We also find an interaction between VWM capacity and CLK in distant scrambling sentences, which suggests that CLK and VWM share the same cognitive resource.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako-shi, Saitama, Japan

    Nobuyuki Jincho

  2. Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Tokyo, Japan

    Reiko Mazuka

  3. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Reiko Mazuka

Authors
  1. Nobuyuki Jincho
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  2. Reiko Mazuka
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nobuyuki Jincho .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Modern Languages & Culture, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, 14623, New York, USA

    Hiroko Yamashita

  2. Department of Language & Information Sci, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 153-8902, Japan

    Yuki Hirose

  3. , Department of East Languages & Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champai, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    Jerome L. Packard

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Jincho, N., Mazuka, R. (2010). Individual Differences in Sentence Processing: Effects of Verbal Working Memory and Cumulative Linguistic Knowledge. In: Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y., Packard, J. (eds) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_3

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