Calvo Manuel G.
University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
Memory. 2001 Jul;9(4):365-381. doi: 10.1080/09658210143000083.
Eye fixations during reading were monitored to examine the relationship between individual differences in working memory capacity-as assessed by the reading span task-and inferences about predictable events. Context sentences predicting likely events, or non-predicting control sentences, were presented. They were followed by continuation sentences in which a target word represented an event to be inferred (inferential word) or an unlikely event (non-predictable word). A main effect of reading span showed that high working memory capacity was related to shorter gaze durations across sentence regions. More specific findings involved an interaction between context, target, and reading span on late processing measures and regions. Thus, for high- but not for low-span readers, the predicting condition, relative to the control condition, facilitated reanalysis of the continuation sentence that represented the inference concept. This effect was revealed by a reduction in regression-path reading time in the last region of the sentence, involving less time reading that region and fewer regressions from it. These results indicate that working memory facilitates elaborative inferences during reading, but that this occurs at late text-integration processes, rather than at early lexical-access processes.
在阅读过程中监测眼睛注视情况，以检验通过阅读广度任务评估的工作记忆容量个体差异与对可预测事件的推理之间的关系。呈现了预测可能事件的上下文句子或不进行预测的对照句子。随后是延续句，其中目标词代表要推断的事件（推理词）或不太可能发生的事件（不可预测词）。阅读广度的主效应表明，高工作记忆容量与跨句子区域的较短注视持续时间相关。更具体的发现涉及上下文、目标和阅读广度在后期加工测量和区域上的相互作用。因此，对于高阅读广度但非低阅读广度的读者，与对照条件相比，预测条件促进了对代表推理概念的延续句的重新分析。这种效应通过句子最后区域的回归路径阅读时间减少得以体现，即阅读该区域的时间减少且从该区域的回归次数减少。这些结果表明，工作记忆在阅读过程中促进精细推理，但这发生在后期的文本整合过程中，而非早期的词汇通达过程中。
