Search

Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.

To account for the linear freedom of either in disjunction constructions, I expand upon the focus-based account of den Dikken (2006). Word order constraints, in contrast to movement rules or base-generation constraints, provide the mechanism for explaining the distributional data. I argue that all positional variability exhibited by either ultimately derives from a licensing construction that enables either to be shuffled about disjunct-internally, yet simultaneously prevents either from entering into linear precedence relations with disjunct-external constituents. Restrictions on the surface realization of either result from a linear precedence rule ordering either before the contrastive focus, language particular constraints on word order, and general constraints on coordinate ellipsis. Overall, this analysis presents an account of either … or constructions that introduces only a single linear precedence rule and a licensing construction for combining either with disjunctions to account for the data, relying on independently-motivated constraints to carry the rest of the analytical burden.

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by a target's representational complexity in terms of syntactic and semantic features. Three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that reading times at retrieval sites (but not earlier) decrease when more complex phrases occur as filler phrases in filler-gap dependencies. The data also show that complexity-based effects are not dependent on string length, syntactic differences, or the amount of processing the stimuli elicit. Activation boosting and reduced similarity-based interference are implicated as likely sources of these complexity-based effects. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

Copyright of Oncologist is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)