Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing

Gordon, Peter; Hendrick, Randall; Levine, William H.

doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00475

Cited by 259 publications

(213 citation statements)

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“…9, page 4 of 25 with adults (Mak, Vonk & Schriefers 2002;Traxler et al 2005;Lowder & Gordon 2014). In studies with adults, Gordon and colleagues (Gordon, Hendrick & Johnson 2001;Gordon, Hendrick & Levine 2002) found an advantage with the mismatch of a lexical-NP restriction. According to Gordon et al, there is a memory load in ORCs with matching feature sets: in both adults and children, the greater the difference between the feature sets of the target and the intervener, the weaker the interference effects in the comprehension of ORCs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

Arosio

Panzeri

Molteni

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have problems comprehending relative clauses (RCs) and find object RCs more difficult than subject RCs, as do typically developing children. Few studies have compared these groups directly, leaving it unclear whether the problems observed in children with DD are similar to those described in SLI. Work with typically developing children has shown that the comprehension of passive RCs is less challenging than that of object RCs. It is argued that this asymmetry depends on intervention effects as modelized in a Relativized Minimality framework. Since movement is challenging for children with SLI and those with DD, examining and comparing their comprehension of object RCs and passive RCs can broaden our understanding of their language deficits. In fact, both structures involve movement, but the moved element and the movement configuration are different.In our study we investigated the comprehension of subject RCs, object RCs and passive RCs in 12 Italian monolingual children with SLI (mean age: 7;6), 13 Italian monolingual children with DD (mean age: 10;7) and 50 typically developing controls matched for age, grammar and vocabulary. Results from a picture selection task show that: (i) subject RCs are unproblematic for all children; (ii) object RCs are challenging for children with SLI, children with DD and younger typically developing controls; (iii) passive RCs are better understood than object RCs in all groups, but still problematic for children with SLI and younger typically developing controls. Our data show that intervention effects are found in children with SLI and children with DD and that those with SLI have a deficit in transferring thematic roles to moved elements. Our results point out that some of the children with DD have a mild grammatical deficit that was undetected or escaped standardized tests.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

Arosio

Panzeri

Molteni

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The authors found that comprehension of object relatives deteriorated sharply when similarity increased, resulting in a structure (subject versus object relative) by similarity interaction. Self-paced reading tasks have also identified stronger similarity/interference effects in non-canonical sentences, leading to longer latencies in the region of the second NP (Gordon et al 2001(Gordon et al , 2002(Gordon et al , 2004. There is also clear evidence that avoidance in production is strongly influenced by interference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Gordon et al (2002) found that interference effects are greater for non-canonical sentences. The study involved processing subject and objective relatives while remembering a list of nouns, which were either similar or dissimilar to the NPs in the sentences (dancer-fireman versus Joey-fireman).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Riches

Garraffa²

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Sentences where like-moves-over-like, e.g. this is the cat that the dog was chasing , have occupied language researchers over the past two decades. They are often described as "intervention" sentences as one element intervenes in the movement of another. Such structures are difficult to comprehend by children or adults, and this effect is exacerbated in language-impaired individuals. Dominant theories, e.g. Rizzi's Relativised Minimality (RM), propose that the two NPs interfere with each other by virtue of having overlapping features. However, such sentences are also rarely encountered due to discourse constraints. For example, subject NPs (the dog) tend to be pronominal as they are typically aligned with topic-hood. This paper investigates whether discourse can account for intervention in questions. It employs a mixed methodology. Firstly, corpora were investigated to assess the degree to which discourse impacts on input frequency. Secondly, a behavioural study was conducted to unpack the relationship between frequency and processing in children. It was found that the input frequencies of intervention structures are predominantly influenced by discourse, and that intervention structures are vanishingly rare in the input. However, a link between frequency and processing was not observed, with the findings more supportive of RM. It is suggested that a consideration of discourse as an external phenomenon may yield new insights into intervention structures.

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“…Other researchers, on the other hand, have claimed for shared resources, where verbally mediated tasks call for the same pool of verbal WM resources irrespective of whether the stimuli tap syntactic processing or not (e.g., King and Just, 1991;Just and Carpenter, 1992). Both theories have found some support in subsequent studies (Gordon et al, 2002;Fedorenko et al, 2006). The mental architecture of verbal WM is nevertheless an important issue here, because the shared resources hypothesis would predict broader potential transfer effects after verbal WM training than the dedicated resource hypothesis.…”

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confidence: 96%

Training of Verbal Working Memory at Sentence Level Fails to Show Transfer

et al. 2017

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During the past decades, working memory (WM) training has attracted considerable research attention, but its transfer to untrained tasks is still controversial. In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated the possible transfer effects of a novel sentence-level WM training regime. Sixty-eight healthy Finnish adults were randomized into either a WM training group or an active control group. The WM training group practiced for 4 weeks with two adaptive sentence-level WM training tasks, namely, a novel sentence-level updating task and a Reading span task. The active control group practiced on a quiz task that called for long-term memory but did not load on WM. There were no statistically significant training effects on the pre-post measures of near and far transfer. We suggest that the lack of training effects may reflect the specificity and automaticity of the sentence-processing system.Keywords: working memory training, verbal working memory, sentence processing, near transfer, task-specific near transfer inTrODUcTiOn Working memory (WM) refers to a mental platform for temporary maintenance, access, manipulation, and coordination of information (Baddeley, 2000). It is a cornerstone for several important cognitive abilities, such as reasoning (Süß et al., 2002;Conway et al., 2003), executive control (Poole and Kane, 2009), and multitasking (Konig et al., 2005;Hambrick et al., 2010). The influence of WM extends even further as WM has been shown to be highly predictive of academic and professional success (Gathercole et al., 2004;Alloway and Alloway, 2010).The key role of WM in cognition has motivated numerous intervention studies that have sought to improve WM abilities with intensive computerized training. Despite very promising early findings (e.g., Jaeggi et al., 2008;Chein and Morrison, 2010), recent meta-analyses on WM training indicate mainly near transfer (i.e., improvements in other, untrained WM tasks), while far-transfer effects (i.e., improvements on tasks tapping other cognitive domains) have been very small (Melby-Lervåg and Hulme, 2013;Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016;Soveri et al., 2017). The most recent meta-analysis examined the near-transfer effects in more detail by separating task-specific near transfer (untrained tasks representing the same task paradigm as the training task and differing only by stimuli) from task-general near transfer (untrained WM tasks structurally different from the training task). The results showed that WM training studies yield moderate task-specific near transfer, while task-general near-transfer effects are very small . Thus, current evidence indicates that WM training produces quite specific and temporary task improvements that do not affect everyday cognitive performances (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016). Given the limited generalizability of WM training, one way to move forward would be to start employing WM training tasks that bear more similarity to everyday cognitive challenges. Several researchers have pointed out that current WM training tasks represent rather artif...

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Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing

Cited by 259 publications

References 20 publications

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Training of Verbal Working Memory at Sentence Level Fails to Show Transfer

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