Saying what's on your mind: working memory effects on sentence production.

The role of working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has received considerable interest, but little work has investigated how sentence production relies on memory mechanisms. Three experiments investigated speakers' tendency to produce syntactic structures that allow for early production of material that is accessible in memory. In Experiment 1, speakers produced accessible information early less often when under a verbal WM load than when under no load. Experiment 2 found the same pattern for given-new ordering (i.e., when accessibility was manipulated by making information given). Experiment 3 addressed the possibility that these effects do not reflect WM mechanisms but rather increased task difficulty by relying on the distinction between verbal and spatial WM: Speakers' tendency to produce sentences respecting given-new ordering was reduced more by a verbal than by a spatial WM load. These patterns show that accessibility effects do in fact reflect accessibility in verbal WM and that representations in sentence production are vulnerable to interference from other information in memory.

[1]  S. Ichikawa,et al.  Rated ease of memorization of dot-in-matrix patterns , 1981 .

[2]  B McElree,et al.  Working memory and focal attention. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[3]  J. Jescheniak,et al.  On the flexibility of grammatical advance planning during sentence production: Effects of cognitive load on multiple lexical access. , 2010, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[4]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  Crossing the Boundaries in Linguistics , 1981 .

[5]  N. Cowan.  The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity , 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[6]  Evie Vergauwe,et al.  Do Mental Processes Share a Domain-General Resource? , 2010, Psychological science.

[7]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Word and World Order: Semantic, Phonological, and Metrical Determinants of Serial Position , 1993, Cognitive Psychology.

[8]  R. Harald Baayen,et al.  Predicting the dative alternation , 2007 .

[9]  J. Lyons.  New horizons in linguistics , 1972 .

[10]  R. Freedle.  Discourse production and comprehension , 1978 .

[11]  Ellen F. Lau,et al.  Agreement Attraction in Comprehension: Representations and Processes. , 2009 .

[12]  Robert G. Crowder,et al.  Short-term memory: Where do we stand? , 1993, Memory & cognition.

[13]  Sébastien Tremblay,et al.  Revisiting evidence for modularity and functional equivalence across verbal and spatial domains in memory. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[14]  M. Daneman.  Working memory as a predictor of verbal fluency , 1991 .

[15]  V. Ferreira.  Is It Better to Give Than to Donate? Syntactic Flexibility in Language Production , 1996 .

[16]  Christian Nagel.  Cognitive load and perspective‐taking: applying the automatic‐controlled distinction to verbal communication , 2000 .

[17]  Matthew Flatt,et al.  PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers , 1993 .

[18]  R. Engle,et al.  The nature of individual differences in working memory capacity: active maintenance in primary memory and controlled search from secondary memory. , 2007, Psychological review.

[19]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  An Activation-Based Model of Sentence Processing as Skilled Memory Retrieval , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[20]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs , 2003, Cogn. Sci..

[21]  A. Miyake,et al.  The separability of working memory resources for spatial thinking and language processing: an individual differences approach. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[22]  A. Agresti,et al.  Categorical Data Analysis , 1991, International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science.

[23]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  The effect of a pragmatic presupposition on syntactic structure in question answering , 1977 .

[24]  J..  Meaning , Sound , and Syntax : Lexical Priming in Sentence Production , 2001 .

[25]  M. Just,et al.  From the SelectedWorks of Marcel Adam Just 1992 A capacity theory of comprehension : Individual differences in working memory , 2017 .

[26]  R. G. Crowder.  The demise of short-term memory. , 1982, Acta psychologica.

[27]  D. Bates,et al.  Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-PLUS , 2001 .

[28]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  How Speakers Refer: The Role of Accessibility , 2010, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[29]  Gary D. Prideaux,et al.  The effect of context on dative position , 1979 .

[30]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[31]  B. McElree,et al.  Memory operations that support language comprehension: evidence from verb-phrase ellipsis. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[32]  R. Grieve,et al.  Definiteness in Discourse , 1973, Language and speech.

[33]  C Stamov Rossnagel.  Cognitive load and perspective-taking: applying the automatic-controlled distinction to verbal communication , 2000 .

[34]  Victor S Ferreira,et al.  Given-New Ordering Effects on the Production of Scrambled Sentences in Japanese , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[35]  N. Unsworth,et al.  Working memory capacity: Attention control, secondary memory, or both? A direct test of the dual-component model , 2010 .

[36]  Mira Ariel.  The function of accessibility in a theory of grammar , 1991 .

[37]  C. Roßnagel,et al.  Lost in thought: cognitive load and the processing of addressees' feedback in verbal communication. , 2004, Experimental Psychology.

[38]  Margaret Wilson,et al.  A visuospatial “phonological loop” in working memory: Evidence from American Sign Language , 1997, Memory & cognition.

[39]  Holly P. Branigan,et al.  Something old, something new: Addressee knowledge and the given-new contract , 2003 .

[40]  J. K. Bock,et al.  Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation , 1985, Cognition.

[41]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Toward a Cognitive Psychology of Syntax: Information Processing Contributions to Sentence Formulation , 1982 .

[42]  Nelson Cowan,et al.  Working Memory Capacity , 2005 .

[43]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  A theory of lexical access in speech production , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[44]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Short-term retention of lexical-semantic representations: Implications for speech production , 2001, Memory.

[45]  R. Engle,et al.  The generality of working memory capacity: a latent-variable approach to verbal and visuospatial memory span and reasoning. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[46]  R. Jackendoff.  Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution , 2002 .

[47]  Richard L. Lewis.  Interference in short-term memory: The magical number two (or three) in sentence processing , 1996, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[48]  F. Ferreira,et al.  The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: a psychometric approach. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[49]  Malcolm Coulthard,et al.  Advances in Written Text Analysis , 1994 .

[50]  K. Bock.  Regulating mental energy: Performance units in language production , 1992 .

[51]  Edward Gibson,et al.  The Nature of Working Memory in Linguistic, Arithmetic and Spatial Integration Processes. , 2007 .

[52]  Michael Hammond,et al.  Studies in Syntactic Typology , 1988 .

[53]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering , 2015 .

[54]  M. Halliday.  The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse, with reference to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species , 2002 .

[55]  Randall Hendrick,et al.  Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing , 2002, Psychological science.

[56]  William S. Horton,et al.  Conversational Common Ground and Memory Processes in Language Production , 2005 .

[57]  Anne Anastasi,et al.  The nature of individual differences. , 1939 .

[58]  M. Sacks.  E-mail notification of your latest issue online! , 2002 .

[59]  Ma Conway,et al.  Handbook of perception and cognition , 1996 .

[60]  W. Chafe.  Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[61]  K. Bock.  An Effect of the Accessibility of Word Forms on Sentence Structures , 1987 .

[62]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts. , 2007, Journal of memory and language.

[63]  William Badecker,et al.  Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production : Evidence from gender and case in Slovak , 2007 .

[64]  R. Berndt,et al.  Working memory retention systems: a state of activated long-term memory. , 2003, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[65]  R. Gerrig,et al.  The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production , 2005, Cognition.

[66]  M. Daneman,et al.  Individual differences in comprehending and producing words in context , 1986 .

[67]  G. Altmann,et al.  The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics , 2007 .

[68]  Fernanda Ferreira,et al.  Age Preservation of the Syntactic Processor in Production , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[69]  J. V. Van Dyke.  Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[70]  Edward Gibson,et al.  The nature of working memory capacity in sentence comprehension : Evidence against domain-specific working memory resources , 2006 .

[71]  N. Cowan.  An embedded-processes model of working memory , 1999 .

[72]  I. Krämer,et al.  Cognitive foundations of interpretation , 2007 .

[73]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence production , 1980 .

[74]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Sentence production: from mind to mouth , 1995 .

[75]  Amanda Stent,et al.  Modeling the dative alternation with automatically extracted features , 2006 .

[76]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  Lexical search and order of mention in sentence production , 1981 .

[77]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Independence of Input and Output Phonology in Word Processing and Short-Term Memory , 1999 .

[78]  Eva Belke.  Effects of working memory load on lexical-semantic encoding in language production , 2008, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[79]  G. Waters,et al.  Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[80]  A. Miyake,et al.  Differential roles for visuospatial and verbal working memory in situation model construction. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[81]  Jeanette K. Gundel.  Universals of topic-comment structure , 1988 .

[82]  K. Oberauer.  Access to information in working memory: exploring the focus of attention. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[83]  M. Usher,et al.  The demise of short-term memory revisited: empirical and computational investigations of recency effects. , 2005, Psychological review.

[84]  J. A. Dyke.  Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing. , 2007 .

[85]  David A. Rettinger,et al.  How are visuospatial working memory, executive functioning, and spatial abilities related? A latent-variable analysis. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[86]  Andrew R. A. Conway,et al.  On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.

[87]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar , 1972 .

[88]  Margaret Wilson,et al.  The effect of irrelevant visual input on working memory for sign language. , 2003, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[89]  Robert J. Hartsuiker,et al.  Language production and working memory: The case of subject-verb agreement , 2006 .

[90]  H. Pashler.  Dual-task interference in simple tasks: data and theory. , 1994, Psychological bulletin.

[91]  A. Miyake,et al.  Models of Working Memory: Mechanisms of Active Maintenance and Executive Control , 1999 .

[92]  R. T. Kellogg,et al.  Working memory components in written sentence generation. , 2004, The American journal of psychology.

[93]  M. D’Esposito.  Working memory. , 2008, Handbook of clinical neurology.

[94]  M. Glanzer,et al.  Two storage mechanisms in free recall , 1966 .

[95]  S. Ichikawa,et al.  Verbal memory span, visual memory span, and their correlations with cognitive tasks , 1983 .

[96]  A. Chatterjee,et al.  Verbs, events and spatial representations , 1999, Neuropsychologia.

[97]  M. McDaniel,et al.  The relationship between working memory capacity and executive functioning: evidence for a common executive attention construct. , 2010, Neuropsychology.

[98]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Lexical‐semantic retention and speech production:further evidence from normal and brain‐damaged participants for a phrasal scope of planning , 2004, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[99]  Charles N. Li,et al.  Subject and topic , 1979 .