Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Research Institute of International Chinese Language Education, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, 100083, China.
Neuropsychologia. 2020 Mar 16;140:107383. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107383. Epub 2020 Feb 10.
During comprehension, language users not only immediately integrate information from local sentence context, but also information from global discourse context for full understanding. In the present study, we examined whether the time course of these integration processes is constrained by language users' working memory capacity. Sentence and discourse stimuli were constructed. For the sentence stimuli, each sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with its preceding sentence context. For the discourse stimuli, each discourse contained four sentences with a target word embedded at the final sentence and the target word was either congruent or incongruent with the information provided at the first sentence of the discourse. Participants of high and low working memory span were instructed to read for comprehension. Our results showed that while the high span readers showed the N400 and P600 effects to semantically incongruent words, the low span readers only showed the P600 effect. This pattern was found regardless of whether the incongruent words were placed at sentence or discourse context. These results suggest that the low span readers are relatively delayed than the high span ones at both sentence- and discourse-level semantic integration and indicate that working memory functions have greater influence than context scope on the time course of semantic integration.
在理解过程中，语言使用者不仅会立即整合来自局部句子语境的信息，还会整合来自全局语篇语境的信息，以实现全面理解。在本研究中，我们考察了这些整合过程的时间进程是否受到语言使用者工作记忆容量的限制。我们构建了句子和语篇刺激。对于句子刺激，每个句子都包含一个关键单词，该单词与它前面的句子语境要么一致，要么不一致。对于语篇刺激，每个语篇包含四个句子，在最后一个句子中嵌入一个目标词，目标词与语篇第一句话提供的信息要么一致，要么不一致。高工作记忆广度和低工作记忆广度的参与者被要求进行阅读理解。我们的结果表明，虽然高记忆广度读者在语义上不一致的单词上表现出 N400 和 P600 效应，但低记忆广度读者只表现出 P600 效应。无论不一致的单词是放在句子语境还是语篇语境中，都会出现这种模式。这些结果表明，低记忆广度读者在句子和语篇层面的语义整合上比高记忆广度读者相对延迟，这表明工作记忆功能对语义整合的时间进程的影响大于语境范围。
