Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English

Abstract

It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.

Agreement effects of gender and number in pronominal coreference processing in Brazilian Portuguese

“…To increase the strength of the inaccessible subject, they used an object pronoun within a relative clause where the inaccessible antecedents were the subject of the clause. Patil et al (2016) found a significant main effect of interference in First Pass and in First Pass Regression Probability. There was also a main effect of match for Rereading times and Total Reading Times.…”

“…Qualitative factors are also important since structural cues are weighted more strongly in retrieval than morphological cues. Patil et al (2016) thought that reflexive binding may be a very informative phenomenon in understanding the role that grammatical and non-grammatical constraints play in memory. The structural constraints of reflexive binding are relatively clear, and this construction admits manipulations of agreement, distance, and distracting antecedent candidates.…”

“…On the other hand, they also found results that were not consistent with Sturt (2003): retrieval times for the match interference condition were shorter than for the match condition and shorter than for the mismatch conditions (mismatch interference effect). Patil et al (2016) suggested that the inacceptable candidates in Sturt (2003) could not be good attractors as semantic matching cues are not able to cause attraction if no grammatical cue is involved. In addition, since they were less recently created in representation, they could not have enough strength in memory to be retrieved due to decay factors.…”

“…In addition, since they were less recently created in representation, they could not have enough strength in memory to be retrieved due to decay factors. Patil et al (2016) also conducted an eye-tracking experiment. To increase the strength of the inaccessible subject, they used an object pronoun within a relative clause where the inaccessible antecedents were the subject of the clause.…”

“…On the one hand, it has been claimed that structurally unacceptable candidates cannot initially influence binding processing even in cases in which they are salient discourse entities and agree with the anaphors (NICOL; SWINNEY, 1989;CLIFTON et al, 1997;STURT, 2003;LEITÃO et al, 2008;XIANG et al, 2009;OLIVEIRA et al, 2012;DILLON et al, 2013;CHOW et al, 2014). On the other hand, other research has shown that structural constraints can be fallible as these studies found that structurally unacceptable candidates can be initially considered as potential antecedents if they are salient entities that feature-match the anaphors (BADECKER; STRAUB, 2002;KENNISON, 2003;PARKER, 2014;PATIL et al, 2016).…”