WORKING-MEMORY AND LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION - A METAANALYSIS

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the data from 6,179 participant s in 77 studies that investigated the association between working-memo ry capacity and language comprehension ability. A primary goal of the meta-analysis was to compare the predictive power of the measures of w orking memory developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980) with the predi ctive power of other measures of working memory. The results of the me ta-analysis support Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) claim that measures that tap the combined processing and storage capacity of working memo ry (e.g., reading span, listening span) are better predictors of compr ehension than are measures that tap only the storage capacity (e.g., w ord span, digit span). The meta-analysis also showed that math process plus storage measures of working memory are good predictors of compre hension. Thus, the superior predictive pou er of the process plus stor age measures is not Limited to measures that involve the manipulation of words and sentences.