The Importance Of Working Memory In Language Processing

Many people who speak two or more languages know the phenomenon of trying to remember a specific word in one language while another word constantly pops up in your mind. This word does often mean exactly what you want to say but unfortunately the word is in the wrong language. This problem might be explained by competition between the different languages. Levy, Mc Veigh, Marful and Anderson (2007) found that once you use a word in one language, the availability of the word in another language is affected. This means that if you study one language it might interfere with the knowledge of another language.

To understand this phenomenon, it is important to gain insight into the language production process. Language processing is often explained

In their hypothesis, working memory pre-selects possible target words, making a faster and more precise search for the target word possible. In this hypothesis the selection of the word in the semantic network is emphasized instead of the inhibition exhibited by earlier retrieval of competing items. Therefore, higher working memory capacity is thought to predict a more precise search for the target, making selection faster and easier for high working memory participants than for low working memory participants. As a conclusion, people with higher working memory capacities should show lower rates of retrieval induced forgetting as the precision of their search is not affected by the earlier retrieval of the word in another language. A second aim of this study is therefore to shed light on the contribution of working memory to the retrieval induced forgetting effect. In order to find out about the effects of retrieval induced forgetting in L2 and examine the contribution of working memory into retrieval induced forgetting, Dutch participants were first tested in English (L2) to establish a baseline of their proficiency in the tested vocabulary. Afterwards, 40 vocabularies which the participants knew were chosen and the participants learned half of them in Spanish (L3). This is predicted to influence the availability of the words in English (Levy et al., 2007). The other half of the vocabulary was not interfered with and served as a baseline. After the learning phase, the participants were again tested in English to establish a measurement for retrieval-induced forgetting and naming performance for the words previously learned in Spanish were compared to the baseline words. To establish a measurement for working memory capacity, an operation span test had to be performed as it was done in the experiment by Aslan et al. (2011). Participants had to