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15 - Working Memory in L2 Learning and Processing

from Part IV - Individual Differences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2019

By
Zhisheng (Edward) Wen  and
Shaofeng Li
Edited by
John W. Schwieter  and
Alessandro Benati
John W. Schwieter
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Alessandro Benati
Affiliation:
American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
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Summary

Working memory (WM) can be thought of as the limited memory capacity that allows us to hold a very small amount of information (e.g., the several digits of our telephone numbers) in our mind and to simultaneously manipulate this information for completing some cognitive tasks in our daily life (Baddeley, 1986; Cowan, 1988). Since the inception of the seminal WM model by the British psychologists Baddeley and Hitch (1974), the concept has received considerable enthusiasm from multiple subfields of cognitive sciences, spanning from such disciplines as psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, biology, and computer science, to anthropology and philosophy (Miller, 2003; Carruthers, 2013; 2015). Concerted efforts are being poured in continuously from diverse research camps, which subsequently give rise to the propagation of a dozen theoretical models of WM (Miyake & Shah, 1999), notwithstanding lingering debates and controversies over the nature and structure of this key construct of human cognition (e.g., Baddeley, 2012; 2017; Cowan, 2014; 2017).

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The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning , pp. 365 - 389
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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