2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Lack of working memory load during sentence comprehension
| Project/Area Number |
23520489
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | University of Tsukuba |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2011-04-28 – 2016-03-31
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| Keywords | 文理解 / 文脈 / 曖昧性 / ワーキングメモリ |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Working memory is a crucial resource in various mental tasks. However, in Japanese sentence comprehension, results from relative clauses have challenged the explanations provided by working-memory models. One problem with previous experimental results is that most showed sentences in isolation, which may have led to greater ambiguity, thus obscuring the predictions of working-memory factors. As opposed to the complex contexts that have been used in past literature, a new simpler context was used to obtain cleaner results for Japanese. Fragment-completion questionnaires indicate that the context had the desired effect and decreased ambiguity by eliminating expectation for alternative interpretations other than relative clauses. Reading-time experiments confirmed previous results suggesting that working-memory models cannot explain the Japanese results. At a talk to be presented in June 2016, I suggested that closure may work as chunking and may cancel out working-memory effects.
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| Free Research Field |
言語処理
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