Direct evidence of memory retrieval as a source of difficulty in non-local dependencies in language
Name
FedorenkoWoodburyGibson_June11-2012_MS_FIN[1].pdf
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277.44 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
86a84f6ae8ba51dd9189b1e98e4db19e
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Cognitive Science
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Citation
Fedorenko, Evelina, Rebecca Woodbury, and Edward Gibson. "Direct evidence of memory retrieval as a source of difficulty in non-local dependencies in language." Cognitive Science 37.2 (2013) p. 378-394.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared to local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered. According to these memory-based accounts, making the first dependent accessible at the time when the second dependent is encountered should help alleviate the difficulty associated with the processing of non-local dependencies. In a dual-task paradigm, participants read sentences that did vs. didn’t contain a non-local dependency (i.e., object- and subject-extracted cleft constructions) while simultaneously remembering a word. The memory task was aimed at making the word held in memory accessible throughout the sentence. In an object-extracted cleft (e.g., It was Ellen who John consulted…), the object (Ellen) must be retrieved from memory when consulted is encountered. In the critical manipulation, the memory word was identical to the verb’s object (ELLEN). In these conditions, the extraction effect was reduced in the comprehension accuracy data and eliminated in the reading time data. These results add to the body of evidence supporting memory-based accounts of syntactic complexity.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12021
https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12021
