Abstract
The relationship between working memory capacity and writing ability was examined via a linguistic analysis of student essays. Undergraduate students (n = 108) wrote timed, prompt-based essays and completed a battery of cognitive assessments. The surface- and discourse-level linguistic features of students' essays were then analyzed using natural language processing tools. The results indicated that WM capacity was related to surface-level, but not discourse-level features of student essays. Additionally, the results suggest that these relationships were attenuated for students with high inferencing skills, as opposed to those with lower inferencing skills.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016 |
Editors | Anna Papafragou, Daniel Grodner, Daniel Mirman, John C. Trueswell |
Publisher | The Cognitive Science Society |
Pages | 2483-2488 |
Number of pages | 6 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9780991196739 |
State | Published - 2016 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 - Philadelphia, United States Duration: Aug 10 2016 → Aug 13 2016 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016 |
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Conference
Conference | 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Philadelphia |
Period | 8/10/16 → 8/13/16 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported in part by the Institute for Educational Sciences, US Department of Education, through Grant R305A120707. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IES.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- computational linguistics
- natural language processing
- strategies
- working memory
- writing