A Psycholinguistic Assessment of the Role of Reading Perspective in Working Memory and Text Recall
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Abstract
This research examines the relation between the reading span capacity of working memory and the strategy of taking a perspective when reading a text, and then recalling its information. The study was conducted on a group of 36 native Arabic speakers, who were divided into three equal groups. Two tests were administered: Daneman and Carpenter's (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) The Reading Capacity Test, and Pichert and Anderson’s (Pichert & Anderson, 1977) The Perspective-based Reading Test, which were administered to measure the participants' reading span and how reading perspective triggers specific cognitive strategies that cause reading span capacity to recall text information better. The results prove that purposeful reading with particular guiding perspectives enhances participants’ working memory by directing attention to aspects more connected to the reader’s purpose, considering that reading with a repeated perspective encodes more information relevant to that assigned perspective. Also, the two tests have confirmed that cognitive capacity and strategies, such as attentional focus, schematic representations, and schema activation, can maintain and enhance working memory span and retrieval.
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