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The effect of working memory capacity on the development of children's sentence comprehension : The case of single-argument sentences

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Abstract In this paper, I demonstrated that there must be enough working memory capacity for Japanese children to correctly comprehend case-markers. Case-markers represent the relationship between a noun and t...he predicate, and this relationship cannot be determined until the predicate is given. In other words, if the predicate is not realized, information of case-markers will be retained up to the timing of predicate input. It is generally considered that information is retained in the working memory, and the accuracy of the retained information depends on the working memory’s capacity. We predict that children’s ability to retain the information of case-markers is dependent on their working memory capacity, and hypothesize that children with insufficient memory capacity cannot utilize case-markers to interpret a sentence due to the inability to retain the information accurately. We conducted a listening span test to assess the working memory capacity, and a picture selection task to examine children’s interpretation of a sentence. In the latter test, we used single-argument sentences to test the children’s comprehension of a sentence with case-markers. The results show that only children in the high memory span group can comprehend both types of single-argument sentences correctly, and support the claim that there must be sufficient working memory capacity in order to comprehend case-markers correctly.show more

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Created Date 2010.02.23
Modified Date 2019.09.06

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