ABSTRACT

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children’s language production. Whereas most of the previous research linking working memory to language development has been correlational, we experimentally varied the working memory load during concurrent language production in children 4–5 years old. Participants were asked to describe simple picture scenes that had recently been described for them in the relatively unfamiliar, passive voice (e.g., the flower was watered by the girl). Children frequently produced the passive voice, a form of syntactic priming. These responses were performed while children sometimes retained a visual-spatial or auditory-verbal working memory load to be recalled after sentence production but there was no effect of the load on syntactic priming. In a second experiment, after hearing passive-voice descriptions of pictures, instead of relying on priming, the children were directly asked to describe the same pictures by speaking in the same “special way.” Surprisingly, under a load, children more often used the passive voice as they were instructed to do, but at the expense of producing additional semantic and grammatical errors (including some nonsensical renditions such as the girl was watered by the flower). We propose that working memory, when available, is used to impose a quality-control process whereby the semantic fidelity of the response to the stimulus picture is preserved, here at the expense of disregarding the experimental instruction to reproduce the passive voice.

摘要

工作记忆是多种认知能力所必需的。开发工作表明，随着工作记忆容量的增加，成功执行其他认知任务（包括语言处理）的能力也会增加。本工作演示了工作记忆的可用性对儿童语言能力的影响。尽管先前将工作记忆与语言发展联系起来的大多数研究都是相关的，但我们实验性地改变了4-5岁儿童在同时进行语言生成过程中的工作记忆负荷。要求参与者用相对不熟悉的被动声音来描述最近为他们描述的简单图片场景（例如，花朵由女孩浇水））。儿童经常产生被动语态，这是一种句法启动的形式。这些反应是在儿童有时保留视觉空间或听觉语言工作记忆负荷以在句子产生后召回时进行的，但负荷对句法启动没有影响。在第二个实验中，在听完图片的被动语音描述后，不再依靠启动，而是直接要求孩子们以相同的“特殊方式”说话来描述相同的图片。出乎意料的是，在有负担的情况下，儿童更经常按照指示使用被动语态，但以产生额外的语义和语法错误为代价（包括一些无意义的演绎，例如女孩被花朵浇灌了））。我们建议使用工作记忆（如果可用）来实施质量控制过程，从而保留对刺激图片的响应的语义保真度，但这样做的代价是无视用于重现被动语音的实验指令。