12 - Working memory and language processing: Theory, data, and directions for future research

Summary

This chapter relates contemporary theories of human memory and linguistic structure. It discusses the evidence for focal attention from basic memory research. The chapter introduces the main source of data one can draw upon in our own research, the speed-accuracy trade-off technique. It also discusses its application to language processing. The chapter describes the evidence that content-addressable retrieval is used in many natural language dependencies. Access to information in long-term memory has generally been regarded as direct, with representations being content-addressable. To retrieve an encoding in a location-addressable memory, it is necessary to have the location or address of the encoding. The chapter reviews the evidence that similarity-based interference is a central cause of forgetting in language. The chapter concludes with some new theoretical assumptions about how linguistic structure interacts with a capacity-limited memory, and outlines questions for future research.