حمیده معرفت

This synthesis reviews the methodological issues in empirical studies investigating the effect of working memory capacity (WMC) on relative clause ambiguity resolution where results have failed to be consistent cross-linguistically and even intra-linguistically. This discrepancy might have occurred due to ‘methodological inconsistencies’ in the design (Liu & Brown, 2015), administration, and scoring of WMC measures. This study aimed to investigate the aggregative and developmental status of the methodological practices of WMC measures and describe how transparently such practices have been reported. Based on a comprehensive search, 39 experiments were retrieved from 25 studies, culminating in a collection of studies with a time span of 22 years from 1999 to 2021, and coded for 46 features. Results revealed that although over the past 22 years, the field has witnessed significant improvements in the employment of WMC tests, there are still a lot of variations and inconsistencies calling for attempts to raise methodological awareness among researchers to afford more attention to quality and transparency in reporting WMC tests. The article concludes with a call for reform in standardizing WMC tests and a number of other recommendations for future primary and secondary research.

Research on relative clause (RC) ambiguity resolution in first and second-language contexts has produced conflicting results, with some studies indicating a preference for high attachment, others favoring low attachment, and some reporting no clear preference. In conjunction with other variables, these mixed results may be due to variations in the methodological features employed across studies. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a systematic review of the methodological features of relevant offline tasks to evaluate how these differences may lead to conflicting results critically. To address this issue, a systematic methodological review was conducted analyzing 108 features of offline tasks, including identification, context, materials, design, administration, data analysis, open science practices, and transparency. The results revealed significant methodological variation in the literature and a moderate mean transparency score of 59.77. These findings emphasize the need for methodological standardization and greater transparency in future research to ensure reliable and comparable RC ambiguity resolution research results.

Extensive research exists on the effects of task design features on measuring L2 learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge. However, the role of structure difficulty has received limited attention. Additionally, the use of fine-grained measures of implicit knowledge has remained underexplored. To address these gaps, utilizing objective criteria to select easy (plural -s) and difficult (third-person -s) structures, a total of 256 experimental items, equally divided into grammatical and ungrammatical, as well as easy and difficult structures, were developed and administered to 32 advanced L2 learners. A word monitoring task (WMT) assessed their implicit knowledge through reaction time (RT) and grammaticality sensitivity index (GSI), while a timed grammaticality judgment test (TGJT) measured their automatized explicit knowledge through accuracy scores. The WMT results showed longer RTs for ungrammatical items and larger GSI for the plural -s items, revealing participants’ more implicit knowledge of the easy structure. The results of the TGJT revealed that L2 learners judged grammatical items more accurately than ungrammatical ones and the plural -s items more accurately than third-person -s ones, showing participants’ more automatized explicit knowledge of the easy and grammatical structures. The findings highlight the influence of grammaticality and structure difficulty on knowledge retrieval and suggest that advanced L2 learners exhibit stronger implicit and automatized explicit knowledge of the easy structure. These findings underscore the need for tailored instructional approaches to address difficult structures and emphasize the importance of using real-time psycholinguistic measures to examine L2 learners’ implicit knowledge.