Short-term Memory Retrievals and Expectation in On-line Sentence Comprehension: The Effects of Recent Linguistic Context.

Understanding how short-term memory shapes sentence comprehension processes is a long-standing topic in psycholinguistics. This thesis pursues new insights on two facets of short-term memory’s role in sentence comprehension: (a) The first four experiments search for, and obtain, concrete evidence that locality effects, or increased integration difficulty attending increased dependent-head distance, occur even in simple sentence, where memory-based theories predict them and other theo- ries (such as experience- or expectation-based theories) do not. (b) The remainder of the thesis investigates the functional interplay between similarity-based interference and expectation. Expectation has been argued to facilitate processing at verbs by pre-activating lexical representations, and similarity between representations of recently linguistic context has been shown to slow processing of verbs by slowing integration of its dependencies with arguments; yet the relationship between these two potentially interacting processes has received neither theoretical nor empirical attention. This thesis presents a novel eyetracking experiment that finds effects of both expectation-based facilitation and retrieval-based difficulty on the integration of a subject-verb dependency, but no evidence of an interaction. This evidence sup- ports a simple model of expectation and retrieval interference in which expectation effects play out in early, lexical processing while dependency integration processes occur later without interacting with expectation.Ph.D.PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86317/1/bartek_1.pd