Abstract for Julie Van Dyke's talk

Retrieval interference in sentence processing
Julie Van Dyke (Haskins Laboratories)
October 31, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

A growing body of evidence suggests that interference effects in sentence processing arise as a consequence of the cue-based retrieval mechanism that supports language comprehension. I will summarize recent reading time studies showing that ambiguous retrieval cues can cause the parser to entertain structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. I will then describe new evidence using the speed-accuracy tradeoff technique, which suggests that the parser is distracted both by information prior to a critical dependent (proactive interference) and by information subsequent to a critical dependent (retroactive interference). These data augment reading time studies by allowing a test of whether interference affects either the probability or the speed of retrieving a target dependent. Preliminary analyses suggest that interference serves mainly to reduce the probability of retrieving the correct dependent. I will discuss the data in terms of a cue-based retrieval parser, and show that it is consistent with other results from the memory domain in which decreasing the distinctiveness of an item in memory causes it to become less available for retrieval.