The nature of working memory capacity in sentence comprehension: Evidence against domain-specific working memory resources

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject- and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the sentence-nouns). A significant on-line interaction was found between syntactic complexity and similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns in the three memory-nouns conditions, such that the similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns affected the more complex object-extracted relative clauses to a greater extent than the less complex subject-extracted relative clauses. These results extend Gordon, Hendrick, and Levine’s (2002) report of a trend of such an interaction. The results argue against the domain-specific view of working memory resources in sentence comprehension ( Caplan & Waters, 1999).