The reading span task is a common memory span

Memory span

In psychology and neuroscience, memory span is the longest list of items that a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after presentation on 50% of all trials. Items may include words, numbers, or letters. The task is known as digit span when numbers are used. Memory span is a common...

 task widely cited in, and adapted for, investigations of working memory

Working memory

Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing...

, cognitive processing, and reading comprehension

Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....

 that was first published by Meredith Daneman and Patricia Carpenter

Patricia Carpenter

Patricia Carpenter is Lee and Marge Gregg Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the organization of the cognitive systems in immediate thought, for example, the processes that underlie problem solving and sentence comprehension...

in 1980.

Original

The original RST required participants to read series of unconnected sentences aloud and to remember the final word of each sentence of a series (grouped according to the total number of sentences). With each sentence presented on a card, participants were cued to recall the memorized end-of-sentence words in their original order by a blank card at the end of a series. The number of sentences of a series was incrementally increased until a participant's reading span, or the maximum number of final words correctly recalled, was found.

The reading span task was the first instance of the family of "complex span" tasks (as opposed to "simple span" tasks). It is a complex verbal test because it draws upon both storage and processing (i.e., reading) elements of working memory, while simple verbal tests (e.g., word span) require the storage element alone.

Variants

Besides the "listening span" variant also developed by Daneman and Carpenter, several variants have been developed in recent years based upon the RST.

Problems

In an attempt to formulate a standardized version of the RST, numerous problems with the original and variants of it have been critically examined.

Findings

Daneman and Carpenter found that reading span was much more strongly related to reading comprehension than word span. Later research corroborated the finding that reading span is more closely related to language comprehension than word span.

Neurobiological basis

In a twin study of middle-aged men, a heritability rating of .51 was found for reading span, where genetic influences came from a common latent phenotype, viewed as most likely reflecting an executive function component.

External links

A reading-span task variant implemented using flash.