The Influencing Factors Of Chinese And English Reading Span: A Latent Variable Analysis Of Three Hypotheses

This study had two major goals: to test three hypotheses concerning the nature of individual difference tapped by working memory span tasks, and to find out the influencing factors of English and Chinese reading span. We used 10 tasks to test 159 seniors of English and Chinese major. The General resource tapped by English and Chinese reading span, digital working memory span and n-back task had significant path coefficients for these manifest variables except for n-back task. The latent Variable analysis challenged controlled attention view. The task-switching hypothesis was not supported by the fact that Chinese reading span was not influenced by the changing of sentence length. All data could be explained by resource-sharing model. Chinese experience tapped by knowledge, Chinese vocabulary, similarity and comprehension ability test from WAIS-RC did not influence Chinese reading span of these seniors of language major in university. It could influence short-term memory span. Chinese reading span was mainly determined by short-term memory span in these subjects. English reading span was determined by both English experience tapped by English vocabulary and grammar test and short-term memory span .