Font Size: a A A

The Research Of Influence Of Working Memory On English Complex Sentence Comprehension

Posted on:2004-12-28Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X WuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360095452242Subject:Development and educational psychology
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
The relation of working memory and language comprehension is one of the focus in the language cognitive psychology field. The researches in psycholinguistic mainly focus on the individual difference shown on the influence of working memory on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguous sentences , garden-path sentences and complex sentences. The study of the influence of working memory on the comprehension of complex sentence is seldom seen in China.This research took the 2×3×4 tri-factor experimental design and randomly sampled the high working memory span and low working memory span subjects, each 10 people, from English-learners of Grade Three in high school, Grade Two and Grade Four in the college. The research took the self-paced word by word moving windows paradigm to investigate the comprehension process and difference of four pattern of complex sentences including center embedded object-clause, center embedded subject-clause, right branch object-clause and right branch subject-clause to provide the psychological basis for improving the English reading methods. We get the following results:(1) Working memory span affects the correctness percentage of complex sentence comprehension, but has no influence on the reading time of complex sentence comprehension.(2) The factor of grade affects the reading time and the correctness percentage of complex sentence comprehension. It shows that the language experience has important influence on complex sentence comprehension.(3)The difference of reading correctness percentage among comprehension of different type of English sentence of the same grade English-learners is significant. Syntactic complexity only affects the reading time of students in Grade Two and Grade Four.
Keywords/Search Tags:working memory, sentence comprehension, complex sentence
PDF Full Text Request
Related items