The Influence Of Working Memory Span On CET6Sentence Comprehension

Working memory has been one of the most influential constructs of the studies on humancognitive functions and has been conceptualized as an active memory system that isresponsible for the temporary maintenance and simultaneous processing of information. Itplays an important role in many complicated cognitive activities, particularly in many aspectsof language learning, such as vocabulary acquisition, language comprehension andcommunication and the development of reading comprehension. Working memory is ahypothesis with limited capacity and the efficient measurement of this capacity is calledworking memory span, which is considered to be about7plus/minus2units or four chunksand last20seconds for the young adults.China has the largest body of English learners all over the world and CET6, a test toguarantee a decent job, is welcomed by students and employers. However, the complicatedsentence comprehension in CET6raises difficulty in passing it easily. Though there arestudies about the relationship between working memory span and L2reading, relative clausesand ambiguous sentences, little attention is paid on the relationship between working memoryspan and the CET6sentence comprehension.Based on the theories of sentence comprehension and working memory, the present studyexplored the relationship between working memory span and CET6sentence comprehensionand attempted to answer the following questions:(1) What influences do sentence types haveon the CET6sentence comprehension scores?(2) What effects does working memory spanhave on the total CET6sentence comprehension scores?(3) What influences does workingmemory span have on the CET6sentence comprehension scores of different sentence types?The research employs the empirical method. The subjects were from the accounting-majorsophomores of Shandong Agricultural University. The author of this study designed two tasksto collect data: Reading Span Test and CET6sentence comprehension test in order toconcentrate on the relationship of working memory span and CET6sentence comprehensionability. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to analyze the collected data,including Pearson correlation analysis, t-test and one-way ANOVA, etc.The major findings of the study are as follows:1) Sentence types influence the CET6 sentence comprehension scores, among which compound sentence type gains the highestmean score and complex sentence type is tested to be the most difficult;2) working memoryspan has high and positive correlation with learners’ total sentence comprehension scores.That is, the higher the WMS, the better the sentence comprehension ability;3) workingmemory span has different correlation coefficients with learners’ sentence comprehensionscores of the four sentence types. There is no correlation between working memory span andsimple sentence comprehension but positive correlations were found with the other threesentence types.These findings indicate that working memory span can be considered as an importantfactor to influence students’ CET6sentence comprehension scores, which have importantimplications for college English sentence teaching and learning. Though there are somepotential values, some limitations need to be improved in further studies.