Study On The Relationship Between Working Memory And Second Language Reading Comprehension

Working memory (WM) is a capacity-limited system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for such complex cognitive tasks as language comprehension, learning, and reasoning. Reading comprehension is a kind of complicated cognitive activity, thus it will bring great pressure on the capacity-limited WM. Psychologists assume that WM is a good predictor for reading comprehension. On the basis of the assumption, foreign researchers have designed various kinds of tasks to measure the capacity of WM to study the relationship between WM and reading comprehension in mother tongues (especially in English), and great success has been achieved. It was not until the 1990s that second language (L2) researchers abroad began to pay attention to the role that WM plays in L2 reading comprehension. In the following years, rapid development led to fruitful achievements. In comparison, most researches at home are also based on the mother tongue of Chinese. However, few domestic studies on the relationship between WM and L2 reading comprehension are found. In addition, researchers both at home and abroad have not reached an agreement on whether WM is language-specific and the relationship between the storage and processing components of WM. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out empirical studies at home to provide evidence for these unsolved problems.With sophomores of English majors in China as the subjects, the "reading span task" was carried out on a personal computer using E-Prime software to measure their capacity of WM, while L2 reading comprehension was assessed by a standardized English reading comprehension test with multiple-choice questions. All the collected data were analyzed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences 17.0 (SPSS 17.0). Tentatively, the following conclusions are obtained:(1) LI WM is in high correlation with L2 WM. In addition, both the storage and processing components of LI WM correspondingly correlate significantly with those of L2 WM. Working memory is not specific to language. (2) The trade-off between the storage and processing components isn't found both in LI and L2 WM. The results support task-switching hypothesis. (3) L2 WM and its storage component significantly correlate with L2 reading comprehension, but the processing component does not. LI WM correlates with L2 reading comprehension at a low but significant level. Consequently, L2 WM is a stronger predictor for L2 reading comprehension as compared with LI WM.