These studies emphasize the content of memory representations, rather than the quantity of information that can be actively maintained in memory ( Gordon et al., 2001, 2004, 2006 Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003 Lewis et al., 2006 Van Dyke and McElree, 2006, 2011 Van Dyke, 2007). Thus, the activation of “ reporter” decays more in the ORC structure due to more discourse referents being processed and fewer resources being available for maintaining syntactic representations, as there is assumed to be a trade-off between processing and maintenance in most capacity models.Ī more recent body of work has focused on interference as an explanation for these effects. However, according to the WM capacity account, comprehenders have to hold “ reporter” in sentence (1b) across some new discourse referents (e.g., the object referent “ senator”) before attaching it to “ attacked” as an object. The attachment of the gap in subject position of the RC to “ reporter” happens immediately as the verb “ attacked” is parsed. Sentences like (1a) could be interpreted in a largely incremental fashion. (1b) ORC: The reporter who the senator attacked admitted the error. (1a) SRC: The reporter who attacked the senator admitted the error. For example, capacity-based accounts attribute the standard advantage in speed and accuracy for processing subject relative clauses (SRCs, as in 1a) compared to object relative clauses (ORCs, as in 1b) to increased WM demands imposed by ORC constructions ( Gibson, 1998, 2000 Warren and Gibson, 2002). Most studies of the role of WM in sentence processing have focused on capacity demands involved in maintaining constituents prior to integration or maintaining predictions of upcoming syntactic structure ( Daneman and Carpenter, 1980 King and Just, 1991 Just and Carpenter, 1992 Gibson, 1998, 2000 Gordon et al., 2001, 2002, 2004 Warren and Gibson, 2002 Fedorenko et al., 2006, 2007 Daneman and Hannon, 2007). Although, there has been a long history of investigation into the role of working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension, controversy remains regarding the kind of memory system that is critical for online sentence parsing. The ubiquitous presence of long distance linguistic dependencies (e.g., subject-verb dependencies across a relative clause as, for example, in “The director who embarrassed the actor apologized”) indicates that some type of memory representation is needed for successful integration of the dependent items. Understanding spoken or written language in real time is essential to our daily life. While neither approach was fully supported, a possible means of reconciling the two approaches and directions for future research are proposed. The results are discussed in relation to the multiple capacities account of working memory (e.g., Martin and Romani, 1994 Martin and He, 2004), and the cue-based retrieval parsing approach (e.g., Lewis et al., 2006 Van Dyke et al., 2014). However, a measure of phonological capacity (digit span) and a general measure of resistance to response interference (Stroop effect) did not predict individuals' interference resolution abilities in either online or offline sentence comprehension. For comprehension question reaction times, a measure of semantic STM capacity interacted with semantic but not syntactic interference. For offline sentence comprehension, as measured by responses to comprehension questions, both general WM capacity and vocabulary knowledge interacted with semantic interference for comprehension accuracy, suggesting that both general WM capacity and the quality of semantic representations played a role in determining how well interference was resolved offline. For online sentence comprehension, as measured by self-paced reading, the magnitude of individuals' syntactic interference effects was predicted by general WM capacity and the relation remained significant when partialling out vocabulary, indicating that the effects were not due to verbal knowledge. We examined interference arising from a partial match between distracting constituents and syntactic and semantic cues, and related these interference effects to performance on working memory, short-term memory (STM), vocabulary, and executive function tasks. Interference effects occur when readers incorrectly retrieve sentence constituents which are similar to those required during integrative processes. This study investigated the nature of the underlying working memory system supporting sentence processing through examining individual differences in sensitivity to retrieval interference effects during sentence comprehension.
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