Working Memory in Second Language Acquisition and Processing

Working memory (WM) generally refers to our ability to briefly maintain and also operate on a limited amount of information in our mind when completing some mentally demanding tasks (Baddeley, 1992). Despite its limited capacity, WM has been found to play a key role in many human central cognitive activities such as language comprehension, arithmetic calculation, prospective planning and problem solving (Carruthers, 2013). Given its fundamental role in so many aspects of human life, WM has garnered enormous enthusiasm from scholars in multiple research fields, straddling virtually all of the six disciplines configured within George Miller’s (2003) hexagon of cognitive sciences: psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, biology, computer science and anthropology.