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Abstract:
Individuals differ greatly on how efficiently they can retrieve words from the
mental lexicon in spoken word production. Little is known about how this individual
difference might be related to individual difference in other cognitive abilities. The
present study investigated the relationship between individuals’ working memory
capacity and their efficiency of lexical access. Speeded naming of drawings of actions
and objects was used to measure the efficiency of lexical access. To assess working
memory capacity, we used the Operation Span (OSPAN) task (Turner & Engle, 1989), in
which participants memorize unrelated words while making judgments on simple
mathematic operations. We found that action naming response time (RT) was
significantly longer than object naming RT. More importantly, there was a significant
negative correlation between the action naming RT and the OSPAN score. There was no
correlation between object naming RT and the OSPAN score. Ex-Gaussian analyses of
the RT distributions revealed that the negative relationship between OSPAN and RT was
evident throughout the distributions (i.e., reflected in the Gaussian part of the
distribution). These results suggest that when words are difficult to select (our verbcondition) people with larger working memory capacity outperform people with
lower working memory capacity.
Turner, M. L., & Engle. R. W. (1989). Is working memory capacity task dependent?
Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127-154.
