ABSTRACT
The ability to communicate through language, which is often said to set humans apart from other animals, is governed by complex cognitive processes enabled by a similarly complex cognitive architecture. The estimated storage capacity of the human brain has recently been revised upwards and put in the range of several million gigabytes. The construct of capacity is usually related to that of working memory and generally understood as the maximum number of resources the system can deploy in order to temporarily retain and process information at a given time. The notion of load finds its origins in educational psychology, more specifically in the construct of Cognitive Load Theory. While comprehension processes are traditionally viewed from the bottom up, production processes are often considered from the top down. Shadowing, in other words the overt verbatim repetition of an auditory message usually heard over headphones, is among the simplest tasks combining language comprehension and production processes in real time.
