The Role of Working Memory in Syntactic Representation and Processing (4/4)

Robert Kluender (Université San Diego)
The Role of Working Memory in Syntactic Representation and Processing (4/4)

The current consensus across cognitive domains is that working memory may be a mere epiphenomenon arising from the attention system acting upon long-term memory representations. This idea has serious consequences for both the nature of the human lexicon as well for the nature of syntactic representation. Likewise, the psychological reality of storage and/or maintenance functions (including capacity limitations), long considered a primary explanandum of the verbal working memory literature, has more recently been challenged and subjected to re-evaluation. This in turn has direct consequences for the way in which we conceive of sentence processing. By way of introduction, this session will present an overview of a variety of theoretical proposals regarding the nature of working memory, both more generally psychological as well as more specifically psycholinguistic, classic as well as contemporary, in order to provide a framework in which to situate subsequent lectures.