On-line syntactic processing under concurrent memory load

Memory-load interference in syntactic processing.

Participants remembered a short set of words while reading syntactically complex sentences (object-extracted clefts) and syntactically simpler sentences (subject-extracted clefts) in a memory-load study. The study also manipulated whether the words in the set and the words in the sentence were of matched or unmatched types (common nouns vs. proper names). Performance in sentence comprehension w...

Age differences in memory-load interference effects in syntactic processing.

The effects of a memory load on syntactic processing by younger and older adults were examined. Participants were asked to remember a noun phrase (NP) memory load while they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. Two types of NPs were used as memory loads: proper names or definite descriptions referring to occupations or roles. The NPs used in the sentence and memory load either matche...

Memory-based Syntactic Processing Memory-based Syntactic Processing Background

Concurrent Processing Memory

A theoretical memory with limited processing power and internal connectivity at each element is proposed. This memory carries out parallel processing within itself to solve generic array problems. The applicability of this in-memory finest-grain massive SIMD approach is studied in some details. For an array of N items, it reduces the total instruction cycle count of universal operations such as...

Concurrent working memory load can reduce distraction.

People have difficulty performing two tasks at once. For example, maintaining items in working memory (WM) makes people more distractible. However, different types of WM load may have different effects on attentional selection depending on whether WM load overlaps with mechanisms involved in target or distractor processing. Three experiments examined the effect of concurrent WM load on Stroop t...