Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese.

Michael C W Yip,Anthony Pak-Hin Kong

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0248170

Michael C W Yip, Anthony Pak-Hin Kong

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248170

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Mar 10, 2021
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Education University of Hong Kong

Abstract

The present study examined how working memory functions in the underlying mechanism of the lexical disambiguation process (in activation approach or in inhibition approach). We recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners to participate in two experimental tasks: (a) a Cantonese-version reading span task to measure their working memory (WM) capacity and (b) a standard cross-modal priming task to measure the lexical disambiguation time. The results revealed that (1) the underlying mechanism of the disambiguation process seemed favorable for an inhibition approach and (2) the frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous words and the numbers of their meanings might interact with the WM capacity during lexical access, particularly for the low-WM span group.

Highlights

Working memory (WM) is a resource-limited storehouse in our cognitive system that is responsible for maintaining and manipulating information in an effective and efficient way in order to perform cognitive processing [1,2,3]
A major theoretical issue in the study of psycholinguistics relates to the nature of how working memory functions in language processing
It is well-documented that there is a strong relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]

Summary

Introduction

Working memory (WM) is a resource-limited storehouse in our cognitive system that is responsible for maintaining and manipulating information in an effective and efficient way in order to perform cognitive processing [1,2,3]. A major theoretical issue in the study of psycholinguistics relates to the nature of how working memory functions in language processing It is well-documented that there is a strong relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Some evidence supports the idea that the mechanism relating WM to language processing should follow an activation approach [14]; people with high working memory spans are more efficient and outperformed those with low working memory spans in parsing because the working memory can help people activate all relevant information supporting the language processing and sentence comprehension [10,12].

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