Abstract
The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is the role of WM in language whose RC processing asymmetry presents conflicting results, e.g., Chinese. This study addresses the research gap. Three experiments with a self-paced listening paradigm interfered with concurrent digit-load and lexical-decision interference were conducted on subject-extracted RCs (SRC) and object-extracted RCs (ORC). Listening times show no disparity between SRCs and ORCs, nor is either SRC or ORC processing more affected by syntactic complexity at comparable positions under each condition. Nevertheless, the post-sentence comprehension shows greater impairment in SRCs than ORCs. The results that memory load interfering does not differentially impair the availability of WM resources used for Chinese RC processing provide evidence for the specialization role of working memory. The findings demonstrate a dynamic, fluctuating wave pattern for Chinese RC processing. We argue that there is no RC processing asymmetry in Chinese.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working memory. Oxford University Press.
Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. J. (1974) Working memory. In: G. A. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 8: Advances in Research and Theory, Academic Press.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2013). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.3.43) [Computer program]. http://www.praat.org/. Accessed March 27, 2013.
Caplan, D., & Waters, G. (1995). Aphasic disturbances of syntactic comprehension and working memory capacity. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 12, 637–649.
Caplan, D., & Waters, G. (1999). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 77–126.
Caplan, D., & Waters, G. (2002). Working memory and online syntactic processing in Alzheimer’s disease: Studies with auditory moving window presentation. Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Gerontological Society of America, 57(4), 298–311.
Carpenter, D., Miyake, A., & Just, M. A. (1994). Working memory constraints in comprehension: Evidence from individual differences, aphasia, and aging. In M. Germsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 1075–1122). Academic Press.
Chen, B., Ning, A., Bi, H., & Dunlap, S. (2008). Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses. Acta Psychologica, 129, 61–65.
Cheng, T., Cheung, H., & Wu, J.-T. (2011). Spoken relative clause processing in Chinese: Measure from an alternative task. Language & Linguistics, 12, 669–705.
Daneman, M., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450–466.
Ferreira, F., & Anes, M. D. (1994). Why study spoken language processing? In M. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 33–56). Academic Press.
Ferreira, F., Henderson, J. M., Anes, M. D., Weeks, P. A., & McFarlane, D. K. (1996). Effects of lexical frequency and syntactic complexity in spoken-language comprehension: Evidence from the Auditory moving-window technique. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 324–335.
Fiebach, C. M., Schlesewsky, M., & Friederici, A. (2001). Syntactic working memory and the establishment of filler-gap dependencies: Insights from ERPs and fMRI. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30(3), 321–338.
Fodor, J. (1983). Modularity of mind. MIT Press.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality and syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76.
Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1411.
Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Levine, W. H. (2002). Memory-load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science, 13, 425–430.
Hsiao, F., & Gibson, E. (2003). Processing relative clause in Chinese. Cognition, 90, 3–27.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122–149.
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Keller, T. A. (1996). The capacity theory of comprehension: New frontiers of evidence and arguments. Psychological Review, 103, 773–780.
Kemper, S. (1992). Language and aging. In F. I. M. Craik & T. A. Salthouse (Eds.), Handbook of Aging and Cognition (pp. 213–270). Erlbaum.
King, J. W., & Just, M. A. (1991). Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 580–602.
King, J. W., & Kutas, M. (1995). Who did what and when? Using word and clause-level ERPs to monitor working memory usage in reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7, 376–395.
Lau, E., & Tanaka, N. (2021). The subject advantage in relative clauses: A review. Glossa, 6(1), 1–34.
Lewis, R. L. (1999). Accounting for the fine structure of syntactic working memory: Similarity-based interference as a unifying principle. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 105–106.
Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2006). Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 447–454.
Lin, C.-J. C. (2006). Grammar and parsing: A typological investigation of relative-clause processing. Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Arizona, Tucson.
Lin, C.-J.C. (2014). Effect of thematic order on the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. Lingua, 140, 180–206.
Lin, C.-J.C. (2015). Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1255.
Lin, C.-J. C., & Bever, T. G. (2006a). A universal account of relative-clause processing in typologically diverse languages. Abstract presented at the 14th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics and the 10th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics Joint Meeting. Academia Sinica, Taipei.
Lin, C. -J. C. & Bever, T. G. (2006b). Subject preference in the processing of relative clauses in Chinese. In D. Baumer, D. Montero, and M. Scanlon (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 254–260.
MacDonald, M. C., Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 56–98.
Miyake, A., Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (1994). A capacity approach to syntactic comprehension disorders: Making normal adults perform like aphasic patients. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 11, 671–717.
Salthouse, T. A. (1991). Theoretical perspectives on cognitive aging. Erlbaum.
Shah, P., & Miyake, A. (1996). The separability of working memory resources for spatial thinking and language processing: An individual differences approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125, 4–27.
Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K., & Seely, R. E. (2002). Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 69–90.
Waters, G., & Caplan, D. (2002). Working memory and online syntactic processing in Alzheimer’s disease: studies with auditory moving window presentation. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 57(4), 298–311.
Waters, G., Caplan, D., & Yampolsky, S. (2003). On-line syntactic processing under concurrent memory load. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(1), 88–95.
Wingfield, A., Peelle, J. E., & Grossman, M. (2003). Speech rate and syntactic complexity as multiplicative factors in speech comprehension by young and older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 10, 310–322.
Funding
This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C. [NSC-102–2410-H-439–001].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The Single Author (Corresponding Author) has received research grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. The author declares no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The author would like to thank Prof. Jei-Tun Wu for his long-lasting encouragement, guidance, and help on statistical issues regarding this study. Heart felt gratitude goes to Prof. Shuanfan Huang for his academic insights, comments, and editing on polishing the draft. Sincere thanks are expressed to two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks would go to my sister, Hong-Qi Cheng (程鴻琦), despite her mental retardation, for giving me emotional support in all the warm bedtime greetings to accelerate the manuscript writing. This study experiences such a long journey to the publication, just as the issue has been long debated regarding processing asymmetry of relative clauses in Chinese. All errors are the single author’s responsibility.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Cheng, T. What Memory-Load Interference Tasks Tell Us about Spoken Relative Clause Processing. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 691–720 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09928-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09928-x