Understanding a sentence requires a working memory of the partial products of comprehension, so that linguistic relations between temporally distal parts of the sentence can be rapidly computed. We describe an emerging theoretical framework for this working memory system that incorporates several independently motivated principles of memory: a sharply limited attentional focus, rapid retrieval of item (but not order) information subject to interference from similar items, and activation decay (forgetting over time). A computational model embodying these principles provides an explanation of the functional capacities and severe limitations of human processing, as well as accounts of reading times. The broad implication is that the detailed nature of crosslinguistic sentence processing emerges from the interaction of general principles of human memory with the specialized task of language comprehension.

This paper presents the cue-based retrieval theory of parsing and reanalysis and illustrates how this account can accommodate a number of key results about parsing and reanalysis, including effects due to structure, distance, and type of structural change. Three offline experiments and one online experiment permit establishing the locus of these effects as due to properties of the initial parsing processes or to the repair mechanism. Specifically, the data reported here suggest that a structural factor specific to the operation of the parser, retrieval interference, affects attachment uniformly across ambiguous and unambiguous sentences and serves to create a limit on successful repair. In addition, these experiments suggest that distance of the head of an ambiguous phrase from its disambiguator affects repair processes-and not attachment processes-independently of the interference effect. These results are interpreted with respect to alternative models of reanalysis, which are contrasted with the cue-based retrieval account, which requires no distinct repair mechanism to account for the current results. A further contribution of this article is to suggest a statistical correction for individual variance in reading rates. Statistical analyses on individual subject data confirmed previous speculations regarding a possible increase in reading rates as subjects move through a sentence. While this individual variation limits fair comparisons of reading times in sentence regions that appear in non-identical serial positions, we demonstrate that such comparisons become meaningful when the appropriate regression analyses have been performed. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Keywords: Parsing; Reanalysis; Ambiguity resolution; Memory retrieval Theories of human sentence comprehension in the last 30 years have primarily addressed questions concerning the initial processing of temporary ambiguities, but recently researchers have paid increasing attention to complementary questions about how the human sentence processing mechanism recovers when initial interpretations prove incorrect (Ferreira & Henderson, 1991b;Fodor & Inoue, 1994Frazier & Clifton, 1998;Pickering & Traxler, 1998;Schneider & Phillips, 2001;Stevenson, 1998;Sturt, Pickering, & Crocker, 1999;Sturt, Pickering, Scheepers, & Crocker, 2001;van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001). Understanding recovery processes is important because the sentence processorÕs response to pervasive local ambiguities is a function of both the principles that govern the initial processing of the local ambiguity, and the principles that govern the processing of the disambiguating material. For example, a theory of why certain sentences yield difficult garden path effects must provide both an explanation of why the incorrect path was initially preferred, and why the recovery was difficult (Frazier & Rayner, 1982). The current paper addresses these questions in two ways. First, we present a new model of parsing, the cue-based retrieval parser, together with empirical resu...

The role of interference effects in sentence processing has recently begun to receive attention, however whether these effects arise during encoding or retrieval remains unclear. This paper draws on basic memory research to help distinguish these explanations and reports data from an experiment that manipulates the possibility for retrieval interference while holding encoding conditions constant. We found clear support for the principle of cue-overload, wherein cues available at retrieval cannot uniquely distinguish among competitors, thus giving rise to interference effects. We discuss the data in relation to a cue-based parsing framework (Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003) and other interference effects observed in sentence processing (e.g., Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001, 2004. We conclude from the available data that the memory system that subserves language comprehension operates according to similar principles as memory in other domains.

The role of interference as a primary determinant of forgetting in memory has long been accepted, however its role as a contributor to poor comprehension is just beginning to be understood. The current paper reports two studies, in which speed-accuracy tradeoff and eye-tracking methodologies were used with the same materials to provide converging evidence for the role of syntactic and semantic cues as mediators of both proactive (PI) and retroactive interference (RI) during comprehension. Consistent with previous work (e.g., Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003), we found that syntactic constraints at the retrieval site are among the cues that drive retrieval in comprehension, and that these constraints effectively limit interference from potential distractors with semantic/pragmatic properties in common with the target constituent. The data are discussed in terms of a cue-overload account, in which interference both arises from and is mediated through a direct-access retrieval mechanism that utilizes a linear, weighted cue-combinatoric scheme.