to be able to reach the level of ultimate attainment in the second language, learners need to acquire not only the grammar of the l2 but also the language processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences in real time. contrary to its importance, very little is known yet about online l2 processing. this study examines whether advanced iranian learners of english reactivate disloc...

Working memory capacity is thought to underlie many higher cognitive processes including sentence comprehension. Sentences that contain object-extracted relative clauses are more complex and impose higher demands on working memory than comparable sentences that contain subject-extracted relative clauses. We report two experiments examining the role of the central executive component of working ...

We examined the relationship between brain activities and task performance on working memory. A large-scale study was initially administered to identify good and poor performers using the operation span and reading span tasks. On the basis of those span scores, we divided 20 consenting participants into high- and low-span groups. In an fMRI study, the participants performed verification of arit...

Experimental research into children's working memory span has shown that retention duration contributes substantially to span performance, while processing efficiency need not be related to concurrent memory load (Towse, Hitch, & Hutton, 1998). These findings have been used to argue for a model of working memory span that emphasizes time-based forgetting rather than the popular resource-sharing...

We introduce and empirically evaluate the strategy-affordance hypothesis, which holds that individual differences in strategy use will mediate the relationship between performance on a working memory (WM) span task and another cognitive task only when the same strategies are afforded by both tasks. One-hundred and forty eight participants completed basic memory tasks and verbal span tasks that ...

The strategy-deficit hypothesis states that age differences in the use of effective strategies contribute to age-related deficits in working memory span performance. To evaluate this hypothesis, strategy use was measured with set-by-set strategy reports during the Reading Span task (Experiments 1 and 2) and the Operation Span task (Experiment 2). Individual differences in the reported use of ef...