Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, 100101.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Feb;31(1):249-258. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02348-5. Epub 2023 Aug 9.
Mounting evidence suggests that people may use multiple cues to predict different levels of representation (e.g., semantic, syntactic, and phonological) during language comprehension. One question that has been less investigated is the relationship between general cognitive processing and the efficiency of prediction at various linguistic levels, such as semantic and phonological levels. To address this research gap, the present study investigated how working memory capacity (WMC) modulates different kinds of prediction behavior (i.e., semantic prediction and phonological prediction) in the visual world. Chinese speakers listened to the highly predictable sentences that contained a highly predictable target word, and viewed a visual display of objects. The visual display of objects contained a target object corresponding to the predictable word, a semantic or a phonological competitor that was semantically or phonologically related to the predictable word, and an unrelated object. We conducted a Chinese version of the reading span task to measure verbal WMC and grouped participants into high- and low-span groups. Participants showed semantic and phonological prediction with comparable size in both groups during language comprehension, with earlier semantic prediction in the high-span group, and a similar time course of phonological prediction in both groups. These results suggest that verbal working memory modulates predictive processing in language comprehension.
越来越多的证据表明，人们在语言理解过程中可能会使用多种线索来预测不同层次的表示（例如语义、句法和语音）。一个较少被研究的问题是一般认知加工与各种语言层次（如语义和语音层次）的预测效率之间的关系。为了解决这个研究空白，本研究调查了工作记忆容量（WMC）如何调节视觉世界中不同类型的预测行为（即语义预测和语音预测）。汉语使用者听包含高度可预测目标词的高度可预测句子，并观看对象的视觉显示。对象的视觉显示包含与可预测词相对应的目标对象、与可预测词在语义上或语音上相关的语义或语音竞争者以及不相关的对象。我们进行了汉语阅读广度测试来衡量言语工作记忆，并将参与者分为高广度和低广度组。参与者在语言理解过程中表现出相当大小的语义和语音预测，高广度组的语义预测更早，两组的语音预测时间进程相似。这些结果表明，言语工作记忆调节语言理解中的预测加工。
