Effects of Recall Training and Comprehension Training

Abstract

The previous chapter presented evidence which indicates that native speakers vary in the manner in which they define their linguistic units. This evidence supports the idea that native speakers differ in the manner in which they represent sentences. If that is the case, then it may be argued that native speaker variations in understanding complex sentences are due to individual differences in syntactic representation rather than inherent individual differences in working-memory capacity (as proposed by Just and Carpenter, 1992). This argument is based on Ericsson and Kintsch’s (1995) theory of skilled processing, which states that total working-memory capacity reflects the efficacy of the representations used to encode inputs in long-term memory (LTM). This chapter describes an experiment carried out to find out if native speaker variations in understanding complex sentences are due to variations in working-memory capacity or to variations in syntactic representation.