Memory Interference During Language Processing

Gordon, Peter; Hendrick, Randall; Johnson, Marcus Lee

doi:10.1037/e501882009-138

Cited by 210 publications

(236 citation statements)

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“…Along these lines, Gordon et al (2001) showed that when the NPs in object and subject relative clauses are of different types, e.g. pronoun vs. definite NP, the processing difference between the relative clause types is diminished.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An increasing amount of evidence from psycholinguistics suggests that the degree to which linguistic representations overlap at both the syntactic and semantic level plays a highly important role in this retrieval process during sentence processing (Anderson, Budiu, & Reder, 2001; Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; Gordon, Hendrick, & Levine, 2002; Gordon, Hendrick, Johnson, & Lee, 2006; Lewis, 1996, 1999; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006; Van Dyke, 2007; Van Dyke & McElree, 2006). Specifically, a retrieval target may share feature values with other locally available representations that are cued at the retrieval site, thereby inducing so-called similarity-based interference.…”

Section: Processing Wh-dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, a retrieval target may share feature values with other locally available representations that are cued at the retrieval site, thereby inducing so-called similarity-based interference. For instance, Gordon et al (2001) show that processing clefted constructions like (9) is easier when the two NPs preceding the subcategorizing verb are of different types (proper name vs. definite description):…”

Section: Processing Wh-dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Hofmeister

Jaeger

Arnon

et al. 2013

Language and Cognitive Processes

146

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Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g. What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g. Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty.*

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Processing Wh-dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Processing Wh-dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Hofmeister

Jaeger

Arnon

et al. 2013

Language and Cognitive Processes

146

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“…Until recently, the common outcome of these studies was that both adults and children were better or faster at processing and comprehending subject relatives, such as (1), than object relatives, such as (2) (e.g., de Villiers et al 1979;Frazier and Clifton 1989;Friedmann and Novogrodsky 2004;Gordon et al 2001;Tavakolian 1981).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We can thus hypothesize that the di‰culties with object relatives observed in previous studies were, at least in part, due to the fact that the test sentences did not match the object relatives that children and adults had experienced in their input and own productions. Instead, children and adults were asked to act out or read object relatives with animate heads and full-NP subjects, such as (4) (Corrêa 1995): (4) the chicken that the pig pushed jumped over the sheep More recent studies in adult psycholinguistics have shown that high processing costs associated with object relatives can be reduced or eliminated when the clauses are attached to inanimate heads (Mak et al 2002(Mak et al , 2006Traxler et al 2002Traxler et al , 2005 or when they contain pronominal subjects (Gordon et al 2001;Reali and Christiansen 2007a;Gibson 2002, 2005). The authors of these studies o¤ered several explanations for these results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

Brandt

Kidd

Lieven

et al. 2009

Cognitive Linguistics

103

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In numerous comprehension studies, across di¤erent languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al. 2007). We tested young 3-year old German-and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's di‰culty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language shape the representation of linguistic structures.

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2020

Introduction to Experimental Linguistics

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Memory Interference During Language Processing

Cited by 210 publications

References 0 publications

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

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