Name : Raihana Sakdiyah

NIM : 2171121025

Subject : Psycholinguistic

Question :

Find a current research article investigating Memory Capacity related to sentence

processing, then:
1. Find the research problem(s) of the article
2. Find the technique of getting the data (= segmenting sentence to answer the research
problem(s))
3. Find the theoretical assumption underlying the research
4. Find the findings of the research article
5. Write a paper reporting the result of your analysis to the research article.

Identity of the article

Title of the article : Age-Related Changes in Sentence Production Abilities and Their
Relation to Working-Memory Capacity: Evidence from a Verb-Final
Language

 Journal : Journal of Memory and Language

 Author’s name : Donald A. Robin,
 Year published : 2015
The technique of getting the data

A total of 60 participants participated in the study ranging in age from 21 to 86. All were
administered a syntactic-priming and a sentence-completion task under either canonical or
noncanonical word-order conditions.

Find the theoretical assumption underlying the research

1. Active sentence: “Mary caught John.

2. Passive sentence (canonical word order): “John was caught by Mary.”

3. Passive sentence (noncanonical word order): “John was caught by Mary.”

The subject, Mary, in the active sentence appeared as a by-phrase in English with a change of
case marker of the nominative (ka) in the active sentence (1) to a dative form of in the passive
sentence (2). A passive sentence (2) can be expressed in a noncanonical word order such as a
sentence (3), in which accusative word (Mary) was placed as the initial word of the sentence.
The researcher examined whether age-related differences exist between canonical and
noncanonical structures in passive-sentence production. He also explores the best predictor for
age among the four types of sentence-production tasks, a stepwise multiple regression analysis
was performed. Age served as a predictor variable. the researcher calculated the percentage of
accurate responses for each sentence-production task and entered the percentages of accurate
responses from the four task types (priming-canonical, priming-noncanonical, completion-
canonical, completion-noncanonical conditions) as predictors.

The findings

This study investigated the best predictor to capture age-related changes in passive-sentence
production using a constrained sentence-production paradigm and explored the role of working-
memory capacity in relation to the task demands of the sentence-production tasks. Age was
significantly and negatively correlated with sentence-production tasks, and the most demanding
condition with a noncanonical word order under the syntactic priming paradigm was the best
predictor of aging. Working-memory capacity was significantly and positively correlated with all
conditions, but the significant correlation remained only for the most demanding condition (the
priming task with a noncanonical word order) after controlling for age.

Sentence-production abilities were vulnerable to aging, and these effects manifested most clearly
when the task demands were high enough to tax individuals’ cognitive capacity. Working-
memory capacity partially accounted for age-related changes in sentence-production abilities.

5. Analysis

My analysis based on the article that I have reported, the topic of the material is easy to
understand because they present investigated the best predictor to capture age-related changes in
passive-sentence production using a constrained sentence-production paradigm and explored the
role of working-memory capacity in relation to the task demands of the sentence-production
tasks

The next analysis is researchable to present good research because the native reseacher did this
research, and they were a success. The sample done well with a good comprehension of how to
segmenting sentences. The discussion of this journal showed Sentence-production ability is
susceptible to aging, and this effect manifests itself most clearly when task demands are high
enough to burden individual cognitive capacities. Working memory capacity partly takes into
account age-related changes in sentence production ability.