Working Memory in the Processing of Long-Distance Dependencies: Interference and Filler Maintenance

Ness, Tal; Meltzer‐Asscher, Aya

doi:10.1007/s10936-017-9499-6

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Wagers and Phillips (2014) claimed that the filler (or at least some information about it) is maintained in the focus of attention during online establishment of this dependency. This result was later confirmed by Ness and Meltzer-Asscher (2017, 2019) and Chow and Zhou (2019).…”

Section: Maintaining Sv Dependencies: the Existing Evidencementioning

confidence: 54%

Maintenance cost in the processing of subject–verb dependencies.

Ristic¹,

Mancini²,

Molinaro³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn't interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.

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Section: Maintaining Sv Dependencies: the Existing Evidencementioning

confidence: 54%

Maintenance cost in the processing of subject–verb dependencies.

Ristic¹,

Mancini²,

Molinaro³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Note, however, it is also possible that information about the filler is actively reactivated (e.g., Nicol & Swinney, 1989) or retrieved from memory (e.g., McElree & Griffith, 1998) at potential gap sites (the retrieval view, or “active filler-retrieval”). We believe these two processes need not be mutually exclusive, but an extended discussion about these competing accounts is beyond the scope of the present paper (see Ness & Meltzer-Asscher, 2017, for a more detailed discussion and an attempt to test these competing accounts).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…This proposal not only posits a distinction between two types of memory representations (representations of syntactic category and semantic features, respectively) required for computing filler-gap dependencies but crucially it also posits a distinction between how easily these two types of representations may be maintained in memory or how quickly they decay over time. As such, it could have important theoretical implications, both for theories of sentence processing (e.g., Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006; Ness & Meltzer-Asscher, 2017; Santi, Friederici, Makuuchi, & Grodzinsky, 2015) as well as models of memory representations (e.g., Baddeley, 2010; Tulving, 1972).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye-tracking evidence for active gap-filling regardless of dependency length

Chow

Zhou

2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Previous work on real-time sentence processing has established that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies without waiting for unambiguous evidence about the actual location of the gap ("active gap-filling") as long as such dependencies are grammatically licensed. However, this generalisation was called into question by recent findings in a self-paced reading experiment by Wagers and Phillips (2014; W&P14) which may be taken to show that comprehenders do not interpret the filler at the posited gap when the dependency spans a longer distance. In the present study we aimed to replicate these findings in an eye-tracking experiment with better controlled materials and increased statistical power. Crucially, we found clear evidence for active gap-filling across all levels of dependency length. This diverges from W&P14's findings but is in line with the long-standing generalisation that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies predictively as long as they are grammatically licensed. We found that the effect became smaller in the long dependency conditions in the post-critical region, which suggests the weaker effect in the long dependency conditions may have been undetected in W&P's study due to insufficient statistical power and/or the use of a self-paced reading paradigm.

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“…Third Issue: Encoding Interference. In recent years, several researchers have suggested that reading time effects previously attributed to the retrieval triggered by a verb may instead be due to a different cognitive process: encoding interference (Ness & Meltzer-Asscher, 2017;Smith et al, 2021;Villata et al, 2018;Villata & Franck, 2020). Encoding interference arises when two elements share similar features, which degrades their distinctiveness in memory (Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006).…”

Section: Attraction In Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reading Signatures of Agreement Attraction

2021

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The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.

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Working Memory in the Processing of Long-Distance Dependencies: Interference and Filler Maintenance

Cited by 14 publications

References 53 publications

Maintenance cost in the processing of subject–verb dependencies.

Maintenance cost in the processing of subject–verb dependencies.

Eye-tracking evidence for active gap-filling regardless of dependency length

The Reading Signatures of Agreement Attraction

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