Estevez A, Calvo M G
Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
Memory. 2000 Jan;8(1):51-61. doi: 10.1080/096582100387704.
A naming task assessed activation of inference concepts during reading. A predicting, or a control, context sentence was followed by a target word to be named, which represented the predicted event or an inconsistent event. The interval between the end of the context and the onset of the target word varied between 50 and 1050 msec. Individual differences in working memory capacity were assessed by the reading span task. As reflected by facilitation in naming latencies in the predicting condition, relative to the control condition, (a) inferences were not made within the first 50 msec after the context, regardless of reading span; (b) only the high-span participants drew inferences within a 550-msec interval; and, (c) both the high- and the low-span participants generated them within a 1050-msec interval. These results indicate that high working memory capacity accelerates the time course of predictive inferences, although they do not become automatic. We propose that this effect occurs because these inferences involve time-consuming elaborations that place demands on the effortful and limited resources of working memory. Deficiencies in word knowledge, speed of lexical access, or comprehension of explicit information do not account for low-span readers' difficulties in generating predictive inferences.
一项命名任务评估了阅读过程中推理概念的激活情况。一个预测性的或控制性的上下文句子后面跟着一个要命名的目标词，该目标词代表预测事件或不一致事件。上下文结束与目标词出现之间的间隔在50到1050毫秒之间变化。工作记忆容量的个体差异通过阅读广度任务进行评估。相对于控制条件，预测条件下命名潜伏期的促进作用反映出：(a) 无论阅读广度如何，在上下文之后的前50毫秒内都不会进行推理；(b) 只有高阅读广度的参与者在550毫秒的间隔内进行推理；以及 (c) 高阅读广度和低阅读广度的参与者在1050毫秒的间隔内都会进行推理。这些结果表明，高工作记忆容量会加速预测推理的时间进程，尽管它们不会变得自动化。我们认为这种效应的出现是因为这些推理涉及耗时的精细加工，这对工作记忆中费力且有限的资源提出了要求。词汇知识的不足、词汇提取速度或明确信息的理解并不能解释低阅读广度读者在生成预测推理时的困难。
