Working-Memory Capacity Sample Clauses

Working-Memory Capacity. To assess participants’ capacity to store items in WM while performing an inter- fering task we used a Dutch version of the Sentence Span Task by Xxxxxxx, Xxxxxxx, and Xxxxx (1989). The task contained four levels with two trials each. On each trial participants listened to a series of unrelated sentences and were asked to remember the last word of each sentence. After answering a comprehension question about one of the sentences, participants recalled the last word of each sentence. At the easiest level children listened to series of two sentences. At each level one sentence was added, increasing WM load, resulting in series of five sen- tences at the most difficult level. If the participant made an error on both trials within a level, the test was discontinued. Participants’ accuracy scores, the sum of correctly remembered words for trials in which the question was answered cor- rectly, were used in the analysis. This scoring method has gained a good internal consistency of .79 (Xxxxxx et al., 2005). The maximum score was 28.