Adams Eryn J, Cowan Nelson
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri.
J Cogn Dev. 2021;22(1):125-148. doi: 10.1080/15248372.2020.1844710. Epub 2020 Dec 8.
Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates effects of working memory availability on children's language production. Whereas most of the previous research linking working memory to language development has been correlational, we experimentally varied the working memory load during concurrent language production in children 4-5 years old. Participants in one experiment were asked to describe simple picture scenes that had recently been described for them in the relatively unfamiliar, passive voice (e.g., ). Children frequently produced the passive voice, a form of syntactic priming. These responses were performed while children sometimes retained a visual-spatial or auditory-verbal working memory load to be recalled after sentence production but there was no effect of the load on syntactic priming. In a second experiment, children were instructed to repeat the recently-heard passive-voice descriptions of the pictures verbatim. Surprisingly, under a load, children more often used the passive voice as they were instructed to do, but at the expense of producing additional semantic and grammatical errors (including some nonsensical renditions such as ). We propose that working memory, when available, is used to impose a quality-control process whereby the semantic fidelity of the response to the stimulus picture is preserved, here at the expense of disregarding the experimental instruction to reproduce the passive voice.
工作记忆对于多种认知能力而言是必不可少的。发展心理学研究表明，随着工作记忆容量的增加，成功执行其他认知任务的能力也会增强，包括语言处理能力。本研究展示了工作记忆可用性对儿童语言生成的影响。尽管之前大多数将工作记忆与语言发展联系起来的研究都是相关性的，但我们通过实验改变了4至5岁儿童在同时进行语言生成时的工作记忆负荷。在一个实验中，参与者被要求描述简单的图片场景，这些场景之前是以相对不熟悉的被动语态描述给他们的（例如， ）。儿童频繁地使用被动语态，这是一种句法启动形式。这些反应是在儿童有时保留视觉空间或听觉语言工作记忆负荷以便在句子生成后回忆的情况下进行的，但负荷对句法启动没有影响。在第二个实验中，儿童被要求逐字重复最近听到的关于图片的被动语态描述。令人惊讶的是，在有负荷的情况下，儿童更频繁地按照指示使用被动语态，但代价是产生了更多的语义和语法错误（包括一些无意义的表述，如 ）。我们提出，当工作记忆可用时，它会被用于实施一个质量控制过程，借此保留对刺激图片反应的语义保真度，在此过程中以忽视再现被动语态的实验指示为代价。
