Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

Abstract

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.

Effects of Animacy and Noun-Phrase Relatedness on the Processing of Complex Sentences

“…This pattern replicates previous work that has examined ORC-SRC differences using eye-tracking methodology (e.g., Gordon et al, 2006;Johnson et al, 2011;Traxler et al, 2002Traxler et al, , 2005. In addition, these results are consistent with previous claims that ORCs are easier to process when NP1 is inanimate and NP2 is animate (Gennari & MacDonald, 2008;Traxler et al, 2002Traxler et al, , 2005.…”

“…According to this account, an animate NP1 followed immediately by an animate NP2 is less expected than an inanimate NP1 followed by an animate NP2, which explains the reading-time differences at NP2. Although the current study cannot rule out an expectation-based explanation of this phenomenon, another possibility is that inflated reading times at NP2 reflect processes that operate under a memory-based framework of RC processing (e.g., Gordon et al, 2001Gordon et al, , 2002Gordon et al, , 2004Gordon et al, , 2006Lewis & Vasishth, 2005;Lewis et al, 2006). Accounts of this sort conceptualize ORC difficulty as stemming from processes associated with memory encoding, storage, and retrieval.…”

“…Recent work has identified a variety of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic factors that moderate the ORC-SRC asymmetry (e.g., Gennari & MacDonald, 2008;Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001, 2004Gordon, Hendrick, Johnson, & Lee, 2006;Johnson, Lowder, & Gordon, 2011;King & Just, 1991;Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002;Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris, 2005;Warren & Gibson, 2002), with these findings being used in the evaluation of competing theoretical explanations of complex-sentence processing (see , for a review). One class of these explanations has focused on semantic and/or pragmatic factors that influence the relationships between key aspects of RC sentences.…”

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

“…Arguably, the first major distinction is between early and late measures (Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989). Although the reported effects in the empirical literature are somewhat mixed (Clifton, Staub, & Rayner, 2007), post-lexical effects such as similaritybased interference are more reliably reflected in measures such as RRT than in measures such as FFD or FPRT (Gordon et al, 2006). Table 4 The model's predicted retrieval latencies for the six conditions (500 runs) Note.…”

“…RBRT may reflect a mix of late and early processes because it subsumes FFDs. Re-reading time (RRT) is the sum of all fixations at a word that occurred after first pass; RRT has been assumed to reflect the costs of late processes (Gordon et al, 2006(Gordon et al, , p. 1308. Another measure that may be related to late processing is regression path duration (RPD), which is the sum of all fixations from the first fixation on the region of interest up to, but excluding, the first fixation downstream from the region of interest.…”