Adults with greater memory capacity, measured by WAIS Digits Backward, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r? · q2
Currency · newest study 1989 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? WAIS Digits Backward performance correlated with utterance complexity and with use of both right- and left-branching clauses. → Kemper 1989

Evidence¶

Kemper 1989¶

Kemper, S., Kynette, D., Rash, S., O'Brien, K., & Sprott, R. (1989). Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400008419

q2 · i? · associational · r?

Correlational analysis linking digit-span performance to clause structure and utterance complexity in the adult language samples. The article reports that "adults with greater memory capacity, as measured by the WAIS Digits Backward test, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses."

"adults with greater memory capacity, as measured by the WAIS Digits Backward test, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Elderly adults show an overall decrement in the complexity of oral and written statements attributable to an age-related loss of left-branching clauses across all three language samples — related
• Better-educated adults scored higher on WAIS vocabulary, produced longer utterances, and used more right-branching clauses — related
• Working-memory capacity correlates positively with accuracy on all four sentence-production conditions — related
• Judges found statements from elderly adults more interesting and clearer than those from young adults, suggesting a trade-off between syntactic complexity and clear, interesting prose — related