Ellipsis interference revisited: New evidence for feature markedness effects in retrieval

Abstract

An active question in psycholinguistics concerns how we mentally encode and retrieve linguistic information in memory. In particular, it remains unclear what information (“cues”) guide retrieval. Previous work has extensively tested retrieval of noun phrases, but less is known about retrieval of other constituents, including verb phrases (VPs). This study examines retrieval for VP ellipsis to allow for a more comprehensive theory of cues. Four experiments (acceptability, self-paced reading) used an interference paradigm to examine voice information (active, passive) in retrieval. Results revealed a selective profile: passive ellipsis shows interference, but active ellipsis does not. These results are aligned with the markedness asymmetry observed for agreement attraction, where marked features (plural, passive) trigger interference, but unmarked features (singular, active) do not. This analysis motivates a unified account of verbal dependencies where markedness plays a more fundamental role than previously assumed. Lastly, I use ACT-R to demonstrate how markedness effects might arise in a cue-based retrieval architecture and discuss the current findings with respect to the leading theories of interference effects.