Working Memory and Its Relation to Auditory Comprehension in Native and Nonnative Speakers

Abstract

There is a relatively robust and continually growing literature addressing the hypothesis that working memory (WM) competencies play an important role in language comprehension. This hypothesis has been investigated as the source for the language comprehension deficits that are a hallmark of aphasia. Additionally, it has been hypothesized that individuals with limited WM facility are negatively affected in second language acquisition and language use. The current study investigated this latter hypothesis and explored the relationship between working memory and sentencelevel auditory language comprehension in native English (L1) speakers with English as their first language and nonnative English (L2) speakers with Korean as their first and English as their second language. It was hypothesized that individuals who demonstrate poorer performance on measures of WM would perform more poorly on sentence comprehension tasks that are more difficult as manipulated by presentation rate and linguistic complexity, and these relationships would emerge more prominently in the L2 group than the L1 group.

The results showed that WM performance significantly predicted auditory comprehension performance under all conditions in both high and lower functioning WM groups. As hypothesized, the L2 low-WM group performed significantly more poorly on the syntactically more complex sentences than the L2 high-WM group. However, the WM group effects were not present in the L1 group. Manipulations of presentation rates did not differentially affect auditory comprehension performance as a function of WM group either in the L1 or L2 groups.