Interference in the processing of adjunct control

Dan Parker,Colin Phillips,Sol Lago

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01346

Abstract

Recent research on the memory operations used in language comprehension has revealed a selective profile of interference effects during memory retrieval. Dependencies such as subject–verb agreement show strong facilitatory interference effects from structurally inappropriate but feature-matching distractors, leading to illusions of grammaticality (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Wagers et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). In contrast, dependencies involving reflexive anaphors are generally immune to interference effects (Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). This contrast has led to the proposal that all anaphors that are subject to structural constraints are immune to facilitatory interference. Here we use an animacy manipulation to examine whether adjunct control dependencies, which involve an interpreted anaphoric relation between a null subject and its licensor, are also immune to facilitatory interference effects. Our results show reliable facilitatory interference in the processing of adjunct control dependencies, which challenges the generalization that anaphoric dependencies as a class are immune to such effects. To account for the contrast between adjunct control and reflexive dependencies, we suggest that variability within anaphora could reflect either an inherent primacy of animacy cues in retrieval processes, or differential degrees of match between potential licensors and the retrieval probe.

Highlights

Linguistic dependencies are subject to diverse structural and morphological constraints
We explored several options for why anaphoric dependencies should vary with respect to facilitatory interference
We argued that variability within anaphora could reflect either an inherent primacy of specific content cues like animacy in retrieval processes, or the differential degree of match between the potential licensors and retrieval probe

Summary

Introduction

Linguistic dependencies are subject to diverse structural and morphological constraints. A comparison of the findings across studies shows a mixed profile of successes and failures of realtime constraint application: some constraints on dependency formation are accurately applied, whereas others are susceptible to errors The reasons for these failures remain poorly understood, but the mixed profile of constraint application has been argued to reflect the way in which different linguistic processes engage memory retrieval mechanisms (Lewis and Vasishth, 2005; Vasishth et al, 2008; Wagers et al, 2009; Phillips et al, 2011; Lewis and Phillips, 2015). Facilitatory interference arises when a structurally inappropriate but feature matching item facilitates the processing of an illformed linguistic dependency This eased processing can trigger ‘illusions of grammaticality,’ which have been argued to reflect limitations of the memory retrieval mechanisms used to implement linguistic constraints (Vasishth et al, 2008; Wagers, 2008). They varied the presence of a plural distractor noun in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences

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Conclusion