Working Memory and the Processing of the Sentence Complexity

The present study examined whether the resources being used in syntactic processes are separable from resources being used in other processes. To do so, the difficulties of reasoning as well as the syntactic complexities of a sentence were varied. If computational demands and sentence complexity demands share the same working memory resources, they would show an interactive pattern. If they do not share the same resources, they would show an additive pattern. As results, this study provided no support for the idea that external reasoning processing demands and syntactic processing demands share general resources with each other. While the reading times were significantly affected by the complexity of the sentences and the complexity of the reasoning, the processing demands from the reasoning did not differently affect the syntactic complexity variables. The current results suggest that reasoning and language processing do not share the same working memory resources.