WM involves ‘the temporary storage and manipulation of information’ necessary for the operation of complex cognitive tasks (Hummel & Holyoak 2003); WM therefore is an indicator of our capacity for thinking and for language processing. The present study will be empirically examining the possible relation between WM working memory and L2 vocabulary learning to test the hypothesis that the capacity of WM is correlated with vocabulary learning rate. Background of literature A WM model first proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974 consists of three basic components: the central executive, the phonological loop and the visual/ spatial sketchpad. In 2000 this model was extended with the multimodal episodic buffer. The central executive directs information to the three processes: the phonological loop, the visual/ spatial sketchpad, and the episodic buffer.
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