ArticleCurrent directions in psychological science2021
The Critical Role of Semantic Working Memory in Language Comprehension and Production.
Article in Current directions in psychological science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive processing of semantic mismatch in Chinese reading: the moderating effect of contextual constraint.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- What electrodes can be used to measure mu rhythm (de)synchronization in the context of speech comprehension studies? An insight from theoretical analysis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Fine-grained changes to implicit memory for language processing across adulthood.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Timed and untimed writing and math: shared and differential cognitive predictors in primary school.Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2025Article
- Differential effects of working memory constraints on syntactic and semantic processing: Evidence from ERPs.Brain and language · 2025Article
- Article
- The role of variation in phonological and semantic working memory capacities in sentence comprehension: neural evidence from healthy and brain-damaged individuals.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Review
- Recovery of Verbal Working Memory Depends on Left Hemisphere White Matter Tracts.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Mismatch Negativity Unveils Tone Perception Strategies and Degrees of Tone Merging: The Case of Macau Cantonese.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Is working memory domain-general or domain-specific?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Short-term retention of words as a function of encoding depth.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Long-range white matter fibres and post-stroke verbal and non-verbal cognition.Brain communications · 2024Article
- Working Memory Models and Measures in Language and Bilingualism Research: Integrating Cognitive and Affective Perspectives.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Distinct Neural Substrates Support Phonological and Orthographic Working Memory: Implications for Theories of Working Memory.Frontiers in neurology · 2021Article
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Abstract
Although research on the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language processing has focused on phonological maintenance, considerable evidence indicates that maintenance of semantic information plays a more critical role. This paper reviews studies of brain damaged and healthy individuals, demonstrating the contribution of semantic WM to language processing. On the sentence comprehension side, semantic WM supports the retention of individual word meanings prior to their integration. It also serves to maintain semantic information in an activated state such that semantic interference between constituents in a sentence can be resolved. Phonological WM does not appear to contribute to either of these functions, though it contributes to verbatim sentence recall. On the production side, evidence points to the phrase as the minimal scope of advance planning in sentence formulation, with semantic WM supporting the representation of the meanings of content words within a phrase. Planning at the phonological level appears to have a very limited scope, making few demands on phonological WM. These findings imply that treatment of semantic but not phonological WM deficits should lead to improved sentence comprehension and production and preliminary findings (Harris, Olson, & Humphreys, 2014) support that view.
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