The structure-sensitivity of memory access: evidence from Mandarin Chinese.

Brian Dillon,Fengqin Liu,Wing-Yee Chow,Taomei Guo,Matthew Wagers,Colin Phillips

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01025

Abstract

The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (MR-SAT) paradigm, we measured the speed with which comprehenders retrieve an antecedent for ziji. Our experimental materials contrasted sentences where ziji's antecedent was in the local clause with sentences where ziji's antecedent was in a distant clause. Time course results from MR-SAT suggest that ziji dependencies with syntactically distant antecedents are slower to process than syntactically local dependencies. To aid in interpreting the SAT data, we present a formal model of the antecedent retrieval process, and derive quantitative predictions about the time course of antecedent retrieval. The modeling results support the Local Search hypothesis: during syntactic retrieval, comprehenders initially limit memory search to the local syntactic domain. We argue that Local Search hypothesis has important implications for theories of locality effects in sentence comprehension. In particular, our results suggest that not all locality effects may be reduced to the effects of temporal decay and retrieval interference.

Highlights

One fundamental question for models of sentence comprehension is the question of how comprehenders are able to construct long-distance linguistic dependencies reliably and rapidly in comprehension
The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension
In competitive model fits to the average time course data, there was a slight advantage for models that allocated different rate parameters to long-distance and local ziji conditions; no such difference was observed for control comparisons

Summary

Introduction

One fundamental question for models of sentence comprehension is the question of how comprehenders are able to construct long-distance linguistic dependencies reliably and rapidly in comprehension. Recent models of sentence comprehension have advanced the hypothesis that this sort of syntactic dependency formation minimally requires the use of memory retrieval mechanisms to access temporally distant syntactic encodings On this view, to interpret the reflexive in the sentence above, comprehenders must retrieve a representation of the antecedent from memory. It has been argued that the memory retrieval mechanisms that underlie sentence comprehension share a number of key features with domain-general retrieval mechanisms (McElree, 2000; McElree et al, 2003; Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al, 2006) Items whose features provide a close match to the retrieval cues are retrieved for further processing (for a discussion of implementations of this idea, see Clark and Gronlund, 1996)

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