Working Memory in English Speech Production: Native Speakers vs. Korean EFL Learners
이옥영 · Seoul National University Open Repository (Seoul National University) · 2020
This dissertation investigates how speech sounds may change as a function of varying working memory load during speech.While cognitive factors have long been suspected to influence speech sounds, being responsible for unexplained variability in speech prosody, the hypothesized connection between cognition and speech production has yet to be systematically theorized with empirical data.Despite the widely accepted assumption in psycholinguistics that working memory involves speech production for temporary maintenance and active manipulation of speech information, the sound planning process remains an open question.Production models not only acknowledge that they only partially account for the phonologicalphonetic encoding processes, but production models also adopt direct retrieval of memorized articulatory routines from long-term memory that may allow speakers to bypass the working memory process.Moreover, a comprehensive review from a memory perspective requires direct evidence and reexamination of the psycholinguistic assumption, suggesting that there is no working memory used in speech production.Furthermore, if the key lies between active ongoing planning and automatic routined response, then native speakers and nonnative speakers of a language may reveal different production patterns.These speaker types and their production patterns have not yet been directly compared in the literature.To address this gap, this study asks whether working memory is involved in English speech production and whether the involvement differs between native (first-language, L1) and nonnative (second-language, L2) speakers of English.To explore how cognitive processing overload derails typical speech sounds, in this study I experimentally manipulated the amount and the type of cognitive load in working memory by having participants engage in multitasking while speaking.Native speakers of American English and Korean EFL learners of English produced a set of syntactically complex sentences under two working memory load conditions and two control conditions.In the load conditions, speakers engaged in an additional task that taxed either verbal or spatial working memory while speaking.In the control no-load conditions, they solved an equation before speaking.