Working Memory in regard to Persian and Chinese words for Persian Learners of Chinese

The present research is aimed to evaluate the working memory (WM) in Persian words (as a L2) in comparison to it in Chinese words (as L1) in Chinese Persian learners. Thirty learners at Dehkhoda institute were chosen as the study sample. Sampling has been relied on the available subjects who took part in the visual n-back task which was specifically designed to measure WM. The participants had to press the congruent key (predetermined number 1) if the stimulus was the same as the one presented just before, and pressed incongruent key (number 2) if it was not. Then they took part in the stroop test. In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. the stroop test here included 40 stimuli- a pseudorandom selection of 20 Persian words and 20 Chinese words, selected among four main color which was written with incongruent ink. The participants had to press the key predetermined the color of the word- not ink-. Accordingly, the score of their WM “accuracy”, WM “mean respond time”, attention bias “accuracy” and attention bias “mean respond time” have been calculated separately for both languages and compared with paired samples T test. Results illustrate a meaningful difference between L1 and L2 among the selective attention mean respond time, WM accuracy and WM mean respond time, and didn’t illustrate meaningful diference between L1 and L2 among selective attention accuracy.