Kosenko
A.
Yuri Fedkovych Chernivtsi
National University
Verbal
working memory and sentence
comprehension
Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological states and mental activity
associated with the use of language [1].
Psycholinguists work to develop models for how language is processed and
understood, using evidence from studies of what happens when these processes go
awry [2]. Research in psychology has
provided considerable evidence for a division between long-term memory, in
which memories of large numbers of facts and autobiographical events are
maintained for up to years, and short-term memory, which is capable of
retaining small amounts of information for very short periods of time [3]. Baddeley and his colleagues introduced the powerful
concept that the appropriate way to characterize short-term memory is as a “working memory” system [4;
755-764]. Working memory is conceived of
as a short-duration limited-capacity memory system capable of simultaneously
storing and manipulating information in the service of accomplishing a task.
Appeal to the notion of a limited-capacity working memory system (or to
equivalent concepts such as “processing
resources”) to account for features of human
cognitive performance is widespread in cognitive psychology, with respect to
both normal functions and the abilities of subjects with developmental and
acquired cognitive disorders. Baddeley and his colleagues proposed the first
model of the functional architecture of human working memory. In his model
working memory is made up of three main components - the central executive, the
articulatory loop, and the visual-spatial scratch pad. The articulatory loop
and the visual-spatial scratch pad are “slave systems” in which verbal and visual information respectively
are stored when the central executive is overloaded. One can conceive of these
components as responsible for maintaining short-term information availability.
The central executive is the workhorse and mastermind of human cognition. It
allocates attention to a task and performs information storage and
computational functions within a given task. To
determine the working memory requirements of a task, Baddeley's theory of the
functional architecture of working memory needs to be supplemented by specific
models of the computational demands that individual cognitive processes make on
the central executive. Current models of cognitive processes provide such
measures. Implemented models provide specific quantitative measurements of the
computational and storage demands of a task. For instance, in procedural models
a measure of the working memory requirements of a computation might be the
number of procedures required to reach a subgoal and the number of elements
maintained in each procedure. In contrast, measures of working memory
requirements derived from neural net models would be quite different, and might
consist of the number of steps that are needed to gravitate towards an
attractor in a neural network. The working memory demands are usually taken to
be the sum of the working memory requirements of the functions that are active
at that point in the task. Many valuable models of cognitive phenomena are not
implemented, but still provide guides to the relative complexity of one
operation, or set of operations, over another. Research into the role of
working memory in cognitive processes regularly appeals to all these types of
models to provide the basis for the determination of the processing demands of
a task and of those demands at a particular point of processing within a task.
There is considerable evidence for a division of the central executive of the
working memory system into visual and verbal components [5]. Particular
interest is in the distinction between the extraction of meaning from a
linguistic signal, (“interpretive processing”) and in the use of that meaning to accomplish other
tasks such as storing information in long term semantic memory, reasoning,
planning actions, and other functions (“post-interpretive
processing”). By “interpretive processing” we refer to the processes of recognizing words and
appreciating their meanings and syntactic features, constructing syntactic and
prosodic representations, and assigning thematic roles, focus and other aspects
of propositional and discourse-level semantics. Many linguists and
psycholinguists have argued that the processes involved in interpretive
processing are distinct from those involved in other verbally mediated
functions (Fodor, Forster, Frazier). Arguments regarding the “modularity”
of interpretive processing have largely centered on the issue of what types of
information are used in the initial determination of linguistic form and
meaning. The question of a cognitive
specialization for interpretive processing is to be addressed
from the point of view of the structure of working memory. The results of a variety of experiments suggest that the working memory system that is
called on in interpretive processing at the sentence level - assigning the
syntactic structure of a sentence and using that structure to determine the
meaning of the sentence - constitutes a separate subsystem within verbal
working memory. This subsystem of verbal working
memory is involved in the set of related operations that is responsible for
identifying linguistic elements and structures and determining the preferred
literal meaning of an utterance.
Bibliography:
1.
Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2006,
Columbia University Press.
2.
Eastman, Carol M., and Longyear, Christopher.
"Linguistics." Microsoft®
Encarta® 2006 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2005.
3.
Squire, L. R., & Zola-Morgan, S. . The medial temporal
lobe memory system. 1991.
4.
Baddeley, A. . Working Memory. In M. S. Gazzaniga
(Ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences. Campidge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 1995.
5.
Shah, P., & Miyake, A. . The separability of working
memory resources for spatial thinking and language processing: An individual
differences approach. 1996