An Experimental Study On Relationships Of College Students' Ability Of Speech Perception And Working Memory Span

This study aims at exploring the relationships of college students' working memory span and ability of speech perception, and therefore the speech perception in this study is discussed on following three levels: verbal fluency, sentences comprehension, and verbal analogies. It is to explore how the working memory span affects verbal fluency, sentences comprehension and verbal analogies, and to what extent. By now, concerned about the effects of working memory span on ability of speech perception, the main theory of speech comprehension is the theory of Working Memory Capacity Constrain proposed by Just et al. It is hoped that the theory of Working Memory Capacity Constrain is tested by experiments, by which to explain whether the theory suits to Chinese population.The operation span task is used to measure working memory span, and the score of working memory span is used to divide subjects into the high working memory span group and the low working memory span group. The subjects after grouping participate in the following verbal perception experiments: (1) verbal fluency experiment contains two parts, phonemic fluency experiment and semantic fluency experiment. The phonemic fluency experiment is measured through character components and making terms by characters and semantic fluency is measured by categorical association. (2) Sentence comprehension is studied by sentence-picture matching paradigm. According to the sentence patterns, sentences can be categorized affirmative sentences and negative sentences, and there are two difficulties under each sentence pattern. (3) Classical analogies paradigm is used for verbal fluency. Word materials are the compositional factors of verbal analogies. Through the form of A : B get C : D, subjects' ability of verbal analogies are inspected.After statistically analyzing the data, conclusions are: (1) As for the verbal fluency, making terms by characters and category associate showed strong relationships with working memory span, in a sense, working memory span has a high predictive validity to the two indexes. As opposed to character components making terms by characters should represent phonemic fluency better. (2) As for the activities of sentence comprehension, working memory span showed strong effects regardless of difficulties of all kinds of sentence patterns. High working memory span should drive individuals more effectively to comprehend sentences than low working memory span do. The more difficult the comprehensive task, the stronger the effect. (3) In the high-level cognitive activities of verbal analogies, the high working memory span should bring about better results by promoting individuals' verbal analogies than that of the low. Contrasting with the index of reaction time, the effects of working memory span to high-level verbal cognitive activities showed significantly on the index of error rate.This study generally showed that working memory span has some predictive effects on the ability of speech perception, especially in the process of much cognitive resources needed. The findings are consistent with the theory of Working Memory Capacity Constrain put forward by Just, and support it.