This paper investigates the nature of verbal working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension and provides evidence for overlapping pools of verbal WM resources between on-line sentence comprehension and other verbally-mediated tasks. We report the results of two dual-task experiments. In Experiment 1, participants simultaneously performed a selfpaced reading task and a self-paced arithmetic addit...

This study explored the effect of contrastive phrase resynthesis instruction ongaining the teachability hypothesis stages in self-paced versus time-constrained oralproduction and recognition. Three groups (i.e., 23 learners) of high beginner femalelearners in an English language institute were randomly selected from a cohort oflearners. One group received contrastive metalinguistic instruction ...

Previous research on smart phone use while driving has primarily focused on phone calls and texting. Drivers are now increasingly using their phone for other activities during driving, in particular social media, which have different cognitive demands. The present study compared the effects of four different smart phone tasks on car-following performance in a driving simulator. Phone tasks were...

Maintaining cognitive control while pursuing several tasks at the same time is hard, especially when the current problem states of these tasks need to be represented in memory. We are investigating the mutual influence of a self-paced and a reactive task with regard to completion time and error rates. Against initial expectations, the interruptions from the reactive task did not lead to more er...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with disturbances in sentence processing, particularly for noncanonical sentences. The present study aimed to analyse sentence processing in PD patients and healthy control participants, using a word-by-word self-paced reading task and an auditory comprehension task. Both tasks consisted of subject relative (SR) and object relative (OR) sentences, with com...

Although there is now substantial evidence that developmental change occurs in implicit learning abilities over the lifespan, disparate results exist regarding the specific developmental trajectory of implicit learning skills. One possible reason for discrepancies across implicit learning studies may be that younger children show an increased sensitivity to variations in implicit learning task ...