Working memory (WM) training explores whether and how repeated practice on working memory tasks might generalize to a variety of outcome measures. Although this field of research is part of the growing literature in cognitive sciences, it has spawned contentious debates. The controversies are largely driven by inconsistent findings and commercial interests, and as a result, numerous meta-analyses and systematic reviews have focused on the validity of WM training. Similarly, there is an inconsistency in the conclusions drawn by these meta-analyses; while there seems to be an agreement about the generalization to proximal cognitive measures; there is a discrepancy in the interpretation of any translational outcomes (e.g., behavioral, clinical, and academic). In this chapter, we review the collection of meta-analyses with a particular focus on children diagnosed with ADHD and other developmental disabilities, and recommend that the field should focus on improving our understanding of the mechanistic and effectiveness properties of WM training, which might result in the development of valuable alternative and/or supplemental approaches, when traditional interventions might fall short, especially for individuals typically underrepresented and underserved.

We start with a brief review of evidence that verbal working memory (WM) involves a limited capacity phonological loop capable of retaining verbal sequences for a few seconds in immediate serial recall, vocabulary acquisition, speech production, and language comprehension. The challenge of explaining how such a system handles information about serial order is discussed in the context of computational models of the immediate recall of unstructured sequences of words, letters, or digits, an extensively studied laboratory task for which there are many benchmark findings. Evaluating computational models against these benchmarks suggests a serial ordering mechanism in which items are simultaneously active before being selected for sequential output by a process of competitive queuing (CQ). Further evidence shows how this process may operate in the context of sequences that conform to various kinds of linguistic constraint. We conclude by suggesting that CQ is a promising theoretical mechanism for connecting and potentially unifying theories of WM and language processing more generally despite major differences in their scope and level of abstraction.

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision-making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in language acquisition and processing has been extensively investigated both empirically and theoretically by researchers from diverse fields of psychology and linguistics, accumulating an increasingly huge body of literature (e.g., see Baddeley, 2003; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993 for reviews of early studies). Notwithstanding, the field still lacks a comprehensive and updated profile of conceptualizing and implementing working memory in the broad domains of native and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. In this chapter, we introduce a comprehensive handbook in which key areas of inquiry and practice in working memory and language are at the forefront and theoretical ingenuity and empirical robustness are integrated throughout.

Working memory and language are tightly intertwined cognitive systems. Working memory enables language acquisition and vocabulary expansion; it supports both language comprehension and language production. Language, on the other hand, provides key representations that support efficient and robust encoding and maintenance of information in working memory, as well as the ability to compress information and the redundancy to reconstruct it in case of partial information loss. The close relationship can also be observed in the overlap and integration of brain systems and networks supporting working memory and language processing. This chapter examines the brain substrate of working memory and language processes, focusing on their interdependence, synergy, and the mechanisms underlying their close integration. It integrates key theoretical models and empirical evidence from behavioural and neuroimaging studies, computational modelling, and insights based on patterns of working memory and language dysfunctions due to brain injury and disease.

In this chapter, we discuss the measurement of working memory capacity and attention control. We begin by examining the origins of complex span measures of working memory capacity, which were created to better understand the cognitive processes underpinning language comprehension. We then review evidence for the executive attention theory of working memory, which places attention control at the center of individual differences in working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Next, we describe the relationship between working memory capacity, attention control, and language comprehension, and discuss how maintenance and disengagement – two functions supported by the control of attention – contribute to performance across a range of cognitive tasks. We then identify factors that threaten the construct and criterion validity of measures of working memory capacity and attention control and detail the steps our laboratory has taken to refine these measures. We close by providing practical recommendations and resources to researchers who wish to use our new measures of working memory capacity and attention control in their work.

This chapter reviews research on the efficacy of training Working Memory (WM) in an educational context. We begin with a brief description of WM, its relation to classroom constructs, an overview of WM training programs, followed by classroom recommendations pertaining to several case studies. We characterize WM training programs into two categories: those that are narrow in scope and those that are broad in scope. Narrow-scope WM training programs are similar to a WM test, while broad-scope WM training programs train WM in the context of broader abilities, such as executive function, attention, or learning skills. Additionally, we discuss the efficacy of WM training with respect to near- or far-transfer effects. Near transfer refers to improvements that are similar to the training program, such as improvements in WM tasks, while far-transfer effects refer to improvements in skills related to the area of training, such as other executive function skills such as inhibition, updating, and planning, as well as attention and fluid intelligence (IQ). We also report whether transfer effects are short-lived or long-lasting (maintenance effects). Finally a discussion regarding implementing WM training in the classroom and future directions are provided.

This chapter presents the hypothesis that working memory and language evolved in tandem. It reviews the evolutionary origins of each of the components of Baddeley’s working memory model and their role in the evolution of language. The chapter reviews the gradualist position that language did evolve slowly from aurally directed early primate calls and notes that the primary purpose of language has always been communication. The chapter also presents the novel idea that the pragmatics of speech (the purposes of speech) also evolved in tandem with the evolution of working memory. The chapter also reviews the saltationist idea that something happened to language more recent than 100,000 years ago, and that is the release of the fifth pragmatic of speech, the subjunctive mood, which expresses wishes and ideas contrary to fact. The subjunctive mood required fully modern working memory capacity, sufficient phonological storage capacity, and an enhanced visuospatial sketchpad, which are also critically involved in episodic memory recall and simulation. The phenotypic result of this genotype meant that thought experiments could be conducted in a recursive manner. We propose that the fruits of Homo sapiens’s cultural explosion, cave art, creative figurines, and highly ritualized burials, were the direct result of the wishes and imaginings that arise from subjunctive thinking and subjunctive language.

Working memory, as a cognitive function, needs to be understood within the context of the mind as a whole, in other words within a general framework that can connect it to related research and theory. In this chapter we present one such broad view of the mind, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), and apply it to the study of working memory, emphasizing its involvement in language development and use. We consider the nature of working memory as an integral part of the cognitive system, along with working memory capacity, offering a relatively fine-grained, cognitively contextualized account of what working memory is and where the capacity limits come from. This approach provides a means of understanding and further studying a range of phenomena, including the nature and use of metalinguistic knowledge, bilingual language “selection”, code-switching, switch costs and their absence, crosslinguistic influence, optionality in second language learning, and translation and interpreting.

Working Memory (WM) is a central structure maintaining information at short term in face of temporal decay and interference for its processing in ongoing tasks. As a consequence, WM is strongly involved in learning, especially in learning first or second languages. The Time-Based Resource Sharing (TBRS) model describes the functioning and development of WM, in particular by integrating the role of executive attention and the time constraints that affect cognitive processes. After a brief overview of the model, this chapter focuses on the distinction between a domain-specific system of maintenance in charge of verbal information and a domain-general system relying on attention. Hence, we show how verbal information is maintained in WM from childhood to adulthood, and how linguistic features of verbal information impact its short-term memory. Conversely, we explain how WM mechanisms in the TBRS model affect the creation of true and false verbal long-term memory traces.

Cognitive load theory is an instructional theory based on our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human cognitive architecture. It can be used to provide instructional guidelines for the acquisition of all aspects of a second language by adults and some aspects, primarily reading and writing, of a first language by both children and adults. The theory assumes that knowledge can be divided into biologically primary knowledge that we have evolved to learn easily without conscious effort and biologically secondary knowledge that we have not specifically evolved to learn but can acquire with explicit instruction and conscious effort. Learning to listen to and speak a first language are biologically primary with all other aspects of language learning being biologically secondary. A general cognitive architecture governs the acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge. That architecture includes a working memory that is limited in capacity and duration when dealing with novel information but with no known limits when dealing with familiar information transferred from long-term memory. This architecture governs how we learn and accordingly, also determines the effectiveness of instructional designs.

Dependency syntax holds that the goal of syntactic analysis is to establish all the binary relations between words in a sentence. This process is closely related to working memory. In a sentence, the words between two syntactically related words make for dependency distance, which is an index of sentence comprehension difficulty because, when the two syntactically related words are combined to each other in working memory, the first of them may suffer from memory decay or memory interference caused by the intervening words. Thus, working memory and the least effort principle may dictate a universal tendency for syntactic structures to be organized in such ways as to reduce dependency distance. This tendency has great shaping effect on the patterns of word order in human languages and is potentially able to account for many linguistic universals in language typology. As for the sporadic long dependency structures motivated by communicative needs, specific syntactic patterns may have evolved, utilizing some cognitive mechanisms to lessen the memory load of these long dependencies. Syntactic structures, therefore, are probably the result of self-adaption of a language system to certain external human constraints and motivations, among which working memory is a very important one.

The phonological component of the working memory system is specialized in maintaining a sequence of verbal items (digits, letters, words, pseudowords) over a very short period of time. Therefore, a central issue has been why we are provided with such ability, and what is its functional role. A series of studies on healthy people, on children learning their mother tongue, on children and young adults learning a second language and, crucially, on neuropsychological patients with a selective deficit of auditory-verbal short-term memory has clearly shown that a fundamental function is to maintain a new phonological representation for a period of time long enough to build permanent phonological representations. This is exactly what happens when we learn a new language. In this chapter I will report converging evidence involving different languages showing how this important result has been obtained.

Research on working memory and language has followed two quite divergent paths. The first line of inquiry examines questions relating to the components and organization of working memory – whether there are specialized buffers, the nature of the link to long-term memory, and so on. For the most part, studies of this type have little to say about the workings of language per se – why it has the particular types of relative clauses or patterns of verbal agreement that it does, for example. These issues fall under the purview of a different line of research, which seeks to trace various fundamental properties of language to the cognitive processes involved in the storage and manipulation of information – working memory, broadly construed. The goal of the latter research program, which I will try to advance here, is to establish that general properties of working memory, however they are ultimately integrated into a theoretical model, can contribute to a deeper understanding of the human language faculty. I will focus here on three phenomena that help illustrate this point – a restriction on the interpretation of reflexive pronouns, a curious prohibition on phonological contraction in a type of wh question, and a baffling constraint commonly known as the ‘that-trace effect.’ A careful examination of their properties reveals a previously unsuspected finding: they are shaped by the need to minimize processing cost, a key factor in our understanding of working memory as well.

Working memory’s limited capacity places significant constraints on people's ability to hold information while processing. However, skilled readers are able to effectively encode important information into long-term memory during comprehension. This chapter describes the long-term working memory theory (LT-WM), originally developed to explain how experts in various domains (including reading) enhance their working memory capacity by relying on rapid, skilled use of long-term memory. We first trace the development of the theory and the reasons it took the form it did in the mid-1990s. We explain that LT-WM was not viewed as a new form of memory, but rather as highly practiced use of long-term memory to rapidly and reliably link information together using meaningful associations, retrieval structures, and preexisting knowledge. Next, we describe how the theory accounted for many central phenomena in discourse comprehension. More recent work has proposed a form of LT-WM for syntactic processing as well, and we discuss current critiques of the original evidence advanced to support LT-WM. Finally, we describe recent studies on neural activity associated with LT-WM development in reasoning skills and language comprehension.

This chapter provides a review of studies on working memory (WM) and interpreting between the 1970s and 2010s, with special attention paid to simultaneous interpreting (SI) and consecutive interpreting (CI). Previous research has investigated three major issues: (1) the interpreter’s advantage over noninterpreters in WM capacity and executive control; (2) the relationship between overall WM capacity, WM executive control and interpreting performance, and (3) the interaction that takes place between long-term memory and WM to facilitate meaning retrieval from the source language, interlingual reformulation, and message delivery into the target language. This chapter will first review major WM models of interpreting to determine what SI and CI have in common and how they differ in processing routes; secondly by examining relevant empirical evidence that (in)validates such models, and thirdly by proposing new possibilities for research on WM in both SI and CI. By means of a synthesized review and an in-depth comparative analysis, this chapter will shed new light on how WM demand differs across interpreting tasks and fluctuates during the interpreting process, which will in turn contribute to future interpreting research and pedagogy.

This chapter addresses the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language production and comprehension, focusing on data from brain-damaged individuals, while also drawing on related findings from healthy adults. The perspective on WM is the domain-specific model which includes WM buffers that are specific to phonological and semantic information and separate from long-term knowledge in these domains (Marti et al., 2020). Thus, the focus is on the separable contributions of these two buffers to language processes