The Relationship Between Working Memory Capacity And L2 Reading Comprehension

Working memory is a theoretical construct within cognitive psychology, which actively processes and stores information. Recently, study on working memory has become one of the focus in the psycholinguistic field. The researches from home and abroad mainly focus on the individual differences shown on the effect of working memory on sentence comprehension such as ambiguous sentences and complex sentences. However, there are few studies on the relationship between working memory and L2 reading comprehension.This study, based on the theories of reading and working memory, aims to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 reading performance among university English learners. The author also attempts to find the answer to the following questions. (1) Is working memory capacity related to the learners'performance in L2 reading comprehension? (2) Is working memory capacity correlated with the learners'English proficiency? (3) Is working memory capacity related to the learners'gender? The-research employs the empirical method. 71 subjects of the research are selected randomly from the non-English major postgraduates of East China University of Science and Technology. From perspective of psychology, this study focuses on the individual differences in the general reading ability, literal understanding ability, and inferential comprehension (information-processing) ability of English learners to provide the psychological evidence for improving English reading methods.The results of the study are as follows:Working memory capacity has high and positive correlation with learners'general English reading ability. There are no significant differences in literal understanding ability among the learners with different working memory capacities. However, these individual differences in inferential comprehension (information-processing) ability are significant. There are mutual effects between working memory capacity and learner's English proficiency level. Gender has no significant effect on learners'working memory capacities.