Specialized Verbal Working Memory for Language Comprehension

This chapter focuses on the working memory requirement of syntactic processing. It illustrates the working memory (WM) requirements associated with syntactic processing and then documents the existence of variability in the subject's efficiency in handling the demands. The relationship is explored as well as the individual differences in WM capacity. There is a focus on research into the WM demands of syntactic processing that has capitalized on the differences in the WM demands associated with processing sentences. Another approach to the study of the functional neuroanatomy of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension has been to compare PET activity associated with processing syntactically more complex objected-extracted sentences to that associated with simpler subjectextracted sentences. Experimental controls and counterbalances were used to ensure that the two conditions differed only along the syntactic dimension.