A Study On The Correlation Between English Majors' Anaphora Resolution And Working Memory Capacity

Working memory is a system with limited resources for temporary storage and processing of information during the execution of cognitive tasks.In recent years,study on working memory and language comprehension is one of the hotspots in the field of language cognitive psychology.Most of the studies focus on the differences of performance of individuals with different working memory in processing the ambiguous sentences,garden-path sentences,compound sentences and other sentence comprehension processing.Few studies were about the correlation between working memory capacity and anaphora resolution performance.This research aimed to investigate the correlation between working memory capacity and anaphora resolution performance of college students.Four research questions about the topic were put forward.Eighty English majors from different degrees were invited to take part in the study.Two kinds of instruments were used in this study.One is an operation-word span task to measure working memory capacity.The other is to test the subjects? performance to resolve anaphora with forty sentences and a discourse.The materials of the study were presented to the subjects through E-Prime 2.0 and PowerPoint 2013.This study mainly adopted One-Sample K-S Test,Independent-Sample T Test and Correlation analysis to do the data analysis.The study gets three major findings.Firstly,a significant positive correlation exists between working memory capacity and pronominal anaphora resolution.Secondly,a significant difference is detected between sentential anaphora resolution performance and discoursal anaphora resolution performance.At last,the learners tend to behave better in resolving discoursal anaphora than in resolving sentential anaphora,no matter how high their working memory capacity is.It is found that subjects have the best performance in resolving indefinite pronoun anaphora,followed by demonstrative pronoun anaphora,and then personal pronoun anaphora,and they get the worst scores in the possessive pronoun anaphor resolution.Based on the findings,some pedagogical implications on English reading teaching are provided.The limitations of the current study and some suggestions for future studies are offered at the end of the thesis.