Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2023 Feb;40(1):1-24. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2023.2206012. Epub 2023 May 1.
Working memory (WM) is critical for many cognitive functions including language production. A key feature of WM is its capacity limitation. Two models have been proposed to account for such capacity limitation: slot models and resource models. In recent years, resource models have found support in both visual and auditory perception, but do they also extend to production? We investigate this by analyzing sublexical errors from four individuals with aphasia. Using tools from computational linguistics, we first define the concept of "precision" of sublexical errors. We then demonstrate that such precision decreases with increased working memory load, i.e., word length, as predicted by resource models. Finally, we rule out alternative accounts of this effect, such as articulatory simplification. These data provide the first evidence for the applicability of the resource model to production and further point to the generalizability of this account as a model of resource division in WM.
工作记忆（WM）对于包括语言产生在内的许多认知功能都至关重要。WM 的一个关键特征是其容量限制。有两种模型被提出来解释这种容量限制：槽模型和资源模型。近年来，资源模型在视觉和听觉感知中都得到了支持，但它们是否也适用于产生？我们通过分析四位失语症患者的亚词汇错误来研究这一点。我们首先使用计算语言学工具来定义亚词汇错误的“精度”概念。然后，我们证明这种精度随着工作记忆负荷（即词长）的增加而降低，这与资源模型的预测一致。最后，我们排除了这种效应的替代解释，例如发音简化。这些数据首次提供了资源模型适用于产生的证据，并进一步指出了该解释作为 WM 中资源分配模型的普遍性。
