Uribe Diana, Schwartz Ana I
Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at El Paso, 500 W. University Ave, El Paso, TX, 79902, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Feb 4. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01687-z.
The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that cross-language activation of cognates significantly increases working memory capacity for bilingual readers. Highly proficient, Spanish-English bilinguals completed the reading span task (RST) in which participants made sentence plausibility judgments while simultaneously holding target words in memory for later recall. Across three experiments the cognate status of either the constituent sentence words or follow-up targets was manipulated. Contrary to our predictions, the presence of cognates in the stimulus set did not have a uniform benefit on performance. Instead, the pattern of performance across experiments indicates that the presence of cognates caused a shift in resource allocation across the two subtasks of the RST. Specifically, when the cognate manipulation was in the target words, sentence plausibility judgments were more accurate in the cognate condition. When the cognate manipulation was in the sentences, target word recall was superior while sentence plausibility judgment accuracy was worse in the cognate condition. The ease of facilitated lexical access of cognate words may have induced this reallocation of resources to the alternative task. These findings have critical implications for the valid use of the RST as a measure of working memory capacity for comprehension in bilingual populations as well as our understanding of the working memory demands of bilingual sentence comprehension and how these are modulated by cross-language lexical activation dynamics.
本研究的目的是检验同源词的跨语言激活是否能显著提高双语读者的工作记忆容量这一假设。高度熟练的西班牙语 - 英语双语者完成了阅读广度任务（RST），在该任务中，参与者在对句子合理性进行判断的同时，还要将目标词记在记忆中以便后续回忆。在三个实验中，对组成句子的单词或后续目标词的同源词状态进行了操控。与我们的预测相反，刺激集中同源词的存在并没有对表现产生一致的益处。相反，各实验中的表现模式表明，同源词的存在导致了在RST的两个子任务中资源分配的转变。具体而言，当同源词操控在目标词中时，在同源词条件下句子合理性判断更准确。当同源词操控在句子中时，目标词回忆在同源词条件下更出色，而句子合理性判断准确性则更差。同源词词汇通达的便利性可能导致了资源向替代任务的重新分配。这些发现对于将RST有效用作双语人群理解工作记忆容量的测量方法，以及我们对双语句子理解的工作记忆需求以及这些需求如何受到跨语言词汇激活动态调节的理解具有关键意义。
