The Correlation Between Individual Differences In Working Memory Capacities And Relative Clauses Used By Chinese Students

As a system used for temporary holding and manipulation of information, working memory has attracted much attention because the capacity of working memory has been regarded as a criteria for measuring the capacity of information processing. However, earlier researches have found that the capacity of working memory consists of seven plus or minus two chunks, and the time for storage only lasts about 20 seconds. Therefore, amounting information will strike a discord with the limited working memory capacities. Researchers of psycho-linguistics once found that students varied in working memory capacities when dealing with the information under a foreign background. As working memory contributes a lot to the acquisition of second language complex sentences, and relative clauses as one of its forms are sure to be favored by people. However, researches touching on the correlation between working memory and relative clauses are hard to find.By referring to Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, this paper attempts to explore the correlation between working memory capacity and relative clauses used by Chinese students. Meanwhile three research questions are formulated. In order to get them addressed, the author in this paper introduced a working memory span test and an English writing task. Under the help of SPSS, productive results have been achieved as follows:(1) the preferred sequence of relative clauses do not match that predicted by perceptual difficulty hypothesis;(2) working memory is positively correlated with the number of relative clauses used by Chinese students;(3) there exist some differences between students with high working memory span and those with low working memory span in dealing with the center-embedded relative clauses and the right-branching ones, and the differences lie in the rate of accuracy and percentages that center-embedded relative clauses account for.