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- Title
Direct Evidence of Memory Retrieval as a Source of Difficulty in Non-Local Dependencies in Language.
- Authors
Fedorenko, Evelina; Woodbury, Rebecca; Gibson, Edward
- Abstract
Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with 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 or did not 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 whom 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.
- Subjects
LINGUISTIC analysis; SEMANTICS (Philosophy); LINGUISTIC complexity; MODEL of text comprehension (Communication); COMPUTATIONAL complexity
- Publication
Cognitive Science, 2013, Vol 37, Issue 2, p378
- ISSN
0364-0213
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/cogs.12021