Reflexive attraction in comprehension is selective

Parker, Dan; Phillips, Colin

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2017.01.002

Cited by 85 publications

(130 citation statements)

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“…In conjunction with prior eye tracking work (Dillon et al, ; Parker & Phillips, ), our data suggest a temporal ordering of processes related to morphosyntax, where anomaly detection precedes memory retrieval processes, which precedes reanalysis as reflected in the P600. This is consistent with proposals arguing that initial ungrammaticality detection can be made on the basis of feature predictions, at least for frequent obligatory morphosyntactic dependencies such as English agreement, but that attraction follows misretrieval of the number‐matching attractor noun (Dillon et al, ; Lago et al, ; Parker & Phillips, ; Tanner et al, ; Wagers et al, ). Our findings therefore place an important constraint on the interpretation of the P600, namely, that the P600 only indirectly reflects detection of morphosyntactic anomalies, and specifically reanalysis (cf.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…That is, recent studies note that there are no clear processing difficulties in grammatical sentences with singular heads and plural attractors (e.g., “The winner of the trophies was … ”) compared to singular‐singular head‐attractor configurations. This finding has led some to postulate that establishment of subject‐verb agreement dependencies utilizes a combination of prediction and retrieval mechanisms (Dillon, Mishler, Sloggett, & Phillips, ; Lago, Shalom, Sigman, Lau, & Phillips, ; Parker & Phillips, ; Tanner, Nicol, & Brehm, ; Wagers et al, ; see also Mehravari et al, ; Tanner & Bulkes, ). On this account, morphosyntactic agreement features for the verb are predicted upon encountering the head NP.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension

2016

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We investigated the relative independence of two key processes in language comprehension, as reflected in the P600 ERP component. Numerous studies have linked the P600 to sentence- or message-level reanalysis; however, much research has shown that skilled, cue-based memory retrieval operations are also important to successful language processing. Our goal was to identify whether these cue-based retrieval operations are part of the reanalysis processes indexed by the P600. To this end, participants read sentences that were either grammatical or ungrammatical via subject-verb agreement violations, and in which there was either no possibility for retrieval interference or there was an attractor noun interfering with the computation of subject-verb agreement (e.g., "The slogan on the political poster(s) was/were …"). A stimulus onset asynchrony manipulation (fast, medium, or slow presentation rate) was designed to modulate participants' ability to engage in reanalysis processes. Results showed a reliable attraction interference effect, indexed by reduced behavioral sensitivity to ungrammaticalities and P600 amplitudes when there was an opportunity for retrieval interference, as well as an effect of presentation rate, with reduced behavioral sensitivity and smaller P600 effects at faster presentation rates. Importantly, there was no interaction between the two, suggesting that retrieval interference and sentence-level reanalysis processes indexed by the P600 can be neurocognitively distinct processes.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

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confidence: 99%

Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension

2016

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“…. However, two recent studies show evidence for the predicted facilitatory effect in target-mismatch configurations in reflexives (Parker & Phillips, 2017) and in non-agreement subject-verb dependencies (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018). ; 0g.…”

Section: Predictions Of Thementioning

confidence: 94%

The Effect of Prominence and Cue Association on Retrieval Processes: A Computational Account

2019

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We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing developed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05). The predictions of the model are compared with the results of a recent meta-analysis of published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies (J€ ager, Engelmann, & Vasishth, 2017). The comparison shows that the model has only partial success in explaining the data; and we propose that its prediction space is restricted by oversimplifying assumptions. We then implement a revised model that takes into account differences between individual experimental designs in terms of the prominence of the target and the distractor in memory-and context-dependent cue-feature associations. The predictions of the original and the revised model are quantitatively compared with the results of the meta-analysis. Our simulations show that, compared to the original LV05 model, the revised model accounts for the data better. The results suggest that effects of prominence and variable cue-feature associations need to be considered in the interpretation of existing empirical results and in the design and planning of future experiments. With regard to retrieval interference in sentence processing and to the broader field of psycholinguistic studies, we conclude that well-specified models in tandem with high-powered experiments are needed in order to uncover the underlying cognitive processes.

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“…The question of why different dependencies show different profiles with respect to interference remains unresolved (see Parker and Phillips, 2017, for discussion). However, many existing accounts agree that for the dependencies that do show interference, such as subject-verb agreement, interference reflects misretrieval of a feature-appropriate items from a structurally irrelevant position (Wagers et al, 2009; Dillon et al, 2013; Tanner et al, 2014; Lago et al, 2015; Tucker et al, 2015; Parker and Phillips, 2017; Tucker and Almeida, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In sentences that give rise to agreement attraction, like (4b), the target subject is encoded as [+subject] and [-plural], whereas the attractor is encoded as [-subject] and [+plural]. In this scenario, the retrieval processes triggered at the verb may retrieve the ‘attractor’ based on the partial match to the [+plural] cue, leading to the false impression that agreement is licensed (see also Dillon et al, 2013; Tanner et al, 2014; Lago et al, 2015; Tucker et al, 2015; Parker and Phillips, 2017; Tucker and Almeida, 2017). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: Experimental Evidence for Selective Agreement Attraction Effects

Parker

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Research on memory retrieval during sentence comprehension suggests that similarity-based interference is mediated by the grammatical function of the distractor. For instance, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) observed interference during retrieval for subject-verb thematic binding when the distractor occurred as an oblique argument inside a prepositional phrase (PP), but not when it occurred as a core argument in direct object position. This contrast motivated the proposal that constituent encodings vary in the distinctiveness of their memory representations based on an argument hierarchy, which makes them differentially susceptible to interference. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested. The present study uses an interference paradigm involving agreement attraction (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009) to test whether the argument status of the distractor determines susceptibility to interference. Results from two self-paced reading experiments show a clear contrast: agreement attraction is observed for oblique arguments (e.g., PP distractors), but attraction is nullified for core arguments (i.e., direct object and subject distractors). A follow-up experiment showed that this contrast cannot be reduced to the syntactic position of the distractor, favoring an account based on the semantic properties of the distractor. These findings support the proposal that interference is mediated by the argument status of the distractor and extend previous results by showing that the effect generalizes to a broader set of syntactic contexts and a wider range of syntactic dependencies. More generally, these results motivate a more nuanced account of real-time agreement processing that depends on both retrieval and encoding mechanisms.

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Reflexive attraction in comprehension is selective

Cited by 85 publications

References 44 publications

Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension

Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension

The Effect of Prominence and Cue Association on Retrieval Processes: A Computational Account

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: Experimental Evidence for Selective Agreement Attraction Effects

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