Different effects of verbal and visual working memory loads on Language prediction

Abstract

Abstract Mounting studies suggest that working memory (WM) plays a crucial role in language prediction, but how varying types of WM loads influence language prediction remains unclear. This study investigated whether verbal and visual WM loads differentially impact language predictions during speech comprehension. Using a dual-task paradigm combined with eye-tracking in a visual world setting, we asked 48 participants to complete a sentence comprehension task under concurrent WM load conditions. Participants were divided into two groups, one of which performed a visual dots memory task and the other completed a visual words memory task, with memory load being applied in half of the trials. Results revealed anticipatory gaze towards target objects, suggesting the prediction of upcoming linguistic information. Notably, early fixations during the tonal cue window indicated tonal prediction in spoken sentence processing. Furthermore, WM load significantly disrupted participants’ language prediction effects, highlighting the involvement of working memory resources in this process. Importantly, the verbal memory task imposed a more severe disruption to language prediction than the visual memory task, suggesting differential roles of WM subtypes in linguistic prediction. This offers novel insights into how verbal WM and visual-spatial WM differentially influence predictive language processing.