Short-term memory and sentence processing: Evidence from neuropsychology

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi C. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory

scholarly journals Enhanced performance on a sentence comprehension task in congenitally blind adults

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Loiotile ◽  
Connor Lane ◽  
Akira Omaki ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Garden Path ◽  
Comprehension Task ◽  
Congenitally Blind

People born blind habitually experience linguistic utterances in the absence of visual cues and activate “visual” cortices during sentence comprehension. Do blind individuals show superior performance on sentence processing tasks? Congenitally blind (n=25) and age and education matched sighted (n=52) participants answered yes/no who-did-what-to-whom questions for auditorily-presented sentences, some of which contained a grammatical complexity manipulation (long-distance movement dependency or garden path). Short-term memory was measured with a forward and backward letter-spans. A battery of control tasks included two speeded math tasks and vocabulary and reading tasks from Woodcock Johnson III. The blind group outperformed the sighted on the sentence comprehension task, particularly for garden-path sentences, and on short-term memory span tasks, but performed similar to the sighted on control tasks. Sentence comprehension performance was not correlated with span performance, suggesting independent enhancements.

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