Processing efficiency theory can explain the relationship between anxiety and academic success; however, its application to adults with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) remains unclear, especially in a nonalphabetic language, such as Chinese. This study investigated the effects of working memory and processing speed on the relationships…

Investigations of working memory advantages in bilinguals yield inconsistent findings. Even less is known about how the addition of languages beyond two (multilingualism) may affect working memory. Due to their experience with managing multiple languages, it is possible that multilinguals may be more practised in the use of their working memories.…

This study used a correlational design and a path analytic approach to investigate direct and indirect relationships between strategic backtracking and integrated text understanding when undergraduates read a digital informational text on a tablet or a smartphone. In digital reading contexts, strategic backtracking involves that readers…

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

Various studies empirically proved the value of highly informative feedback for enhancing learner success. However, digital educational technology has yet to catch up as automated feedback is often provided shallowly. This paper presents a case study on implementing a pipeline that provides German-speaking university students enrolled in an…

Background: Phonological working memory is key to vocabulary acquisition, spoken word recognition, real-time language processing, and reading. Transcranial direct current stimulation, when coupled with behavioral training, has been shown to facilitate speech motor output processes, a key component of nonword repetition, the primary task used to…

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., "polarity effect"). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task.…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

The underlying cognitive mechanisms explaining why speakers sometimes make communication errors are not well understood. Some scholars have theorized that audience design engages automatic processes when a listener is present; others argue that it relies on effortful resources, even if a listener is present. We hypothesized that working memory is…

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it…

An increasing number of adults learn more than one foreign language simultaneously. While the cognitive benefits of using multiple languages from birth have been studied extensively, little is known about possible cognitive benefits of learning multiple languages simultaneously in adulthood. Among the cognitive abilities which play a role in…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…

This study examined the role of error-type and working memory (WM) in the effectiveness of direct-metalinguistic and indirect written corrective feedback (WCF) on self error-correction in first-language writing. Fifty-one French first-year psychology students volunteered to participate in the experiment. They carried out a first-language…

According to contemporary accounts, linguistic behavior reflects the interaction of distinct representations supporting word meaning and phonology. However, there is controversy about the extent to which this interaction occurs within task-specific systems, specialized for reading and short-term memory (STM), as opposed to between components that…