Similarity-based Interference Research Articles

Similarity-based interference in agreement comprehension and production: Evidence from object agreement.

Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the presence of an attractor mismatching the agreement feature of the target. In contrast, results from comprehension studies are mixed, ranging from lack of effect to facilitation. We report 2 forced-choice experiments and 2 self-paced reading experiments on number and gender object-verb agreement in French to systematically explore the effect of a mismatching subject in the production and comprehension of object relatives. Results show that the presence of a mismatching subject penalizes sentence production, in line with reports of attraction, but consistently improves sentence comprehension in off-line comprehension measures, in line with similarity-based interference effects. We discuss the limits of classical models of sentence production and comprehension (Marking and Morphing and ACT-R), and favor a self-organizing sentence processing approach (SOSP), which accounts for both production and comprehension results through a single similarity-based mechanism of structure building. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Error-Driven Retrieval in Agreement Attraction Rarely Leads to Misinterpretation.

Previous work on agreement computation in sentence comprehension motivates a model in which the parser predicts the verb’s number and engages in retrieval of the agreement controller only when it detects a mismatch between the prediction and the bottom-up input. It is the error-driven second stage of this process that is prone to similarity-based interference and can result in the illusory licensing of a subject–verb number agreement violation in the presence of a structurally irrelevant noun matching the number marking on the verb (‘The bed by the lamps were…’), giving rise to an effect known as ‘agreement attraction’. Here we ask to what extent the error-driven retrieval process underlying the illusory licensing alters the structural and thematic representation of the sentence. We use a novel dual-task paradigm that combines self-paced reading with a speeded forced choice task to investigate whether agreement attraction leads comprehenders to erroneously interpret the attractor as the thematic subject, which would indicate structural reanalysis. Participants read sentence fragments (‘The bed by the lamp/lamps was/were undoubtedly quite’) and completed the sentences by choosing between two adjectives (‘comfortable’/’bright’) which were either compatible with the subject’s head noun or with the attractor. We found the expected agreement attraction profile in the self-paced reading data but the interpretive error occurs on only a small subset of attraction trials, suggesting that in agreement attraction agreement checking rarely matches the thematic relation. We propose that illusory licensing of an agreement violation often reflects a low-level rechecking process that is only concerned with number and does not have an impact on the structural representation of the sentence. Interestingly, this suggests that error-driven repair processes can result in a globally inconsistent final sentence representation with a persistent mismatch between the subject and the verb.

Supplemental Material for Similarity-Based Interference in Agreement Comprehension and Production: Evidence From Object Agreement

Supplemental Material for Similarity-Based Interference in Agreement Comprehension and Production: Evidence From Object Agreement

When is the verb a potential gap site? The influence of filler maintenance on the active search for a gap

ABSTRACTThroughout an open filler-gap dependency, some features of the filler are actively maintained in working-memory, while others decay and are retrieved at the gap. The current study asks whether the availability of certain features of the filler (due to their maintenance) influences the parser’s attempt to posit a gap upon encountering a verb. We report the results of two self-paced reading experiments testing the hypothesis that maintained features guide active gap-filling. Experiment 1 used similarity-based interference to show that animacy is a maintained feature. Experiment 2 combined a filled-gap design and a plausibility manipulation, with violation of either the animacy requirement or some other selectional restriction of the verb, to test when an attempt to resolve a dependency is made despite poor fit between the verb and the filler. Results suggest that only verbs selecting an argument with features like those maintained in the filler’s representation trigger an attempt to resolve the dependency.

Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It\u2019s all in the features

Echoing many of the themes of the seminal work of Atkinson and Shiffrin (The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2; 89–195, 1968), this paper uses the feature model (Nairne, Memory & Cognition, 16, 343–352, 1988; Nairne, Memory & Cognition, 18; 251–269, 1990; Neath & Nairne, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2; 429–441, 1995) to account for performance in working-memory tasks. The Brooks verbal and visuo-spatial matrix tasks were performed alone, with articulatory suppression, or with a spatial suppression task; the results produced the expected dissociation. We used approximate Bayesian computation techniques to fit the feature model to the data and showed that the similarity-based interference process implemented in the model accounted for the data patterns well. We then fit the model to data from Guérard and Tremblay (2008, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 556–569); the latter study produced a double dissociation while calling upon more typical order reconstruction tasks. Again, the model performed well. The findings show that a double dissociation can be modelled without appealing to separate systems for verbal and visuo-spatial processing. The latter findings are significant as the feature model had not been used to model this type of dissociation before; importantly, this is also the first time the model is quantitatively fit to data. For the demonstration provided here, modularity was unnecessary if two assumptions were made: (1) the main difference between spatial and verbal working-memory tasks is the features that are encoded; (2) secondary tasks selectively interfere with primary tasks to the extent that both tasks involve similar features. It is argued that a feature-based view is more parsimonious (see Morey, 2018, Psychological Bulletin, 144, 849–883) and offers flexibility in accounting for multiple benchmark effects in the field.

Retrieval interference and semantic interpretation

Similarity-based interference has played an important role in motivating cue-based models of memory retrieval during language comprehension. One example of interference comes from illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g. ‘the key to the cabinets were rusty’). While such effects indicate interference influences perception of sentence grammaticality, less is known about how interference influences the semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. We report two reading experiments that manipulated sentence plausibility, rather than grammaticality, as a diagnostic of interference. In both experiments, although reading times were longer for implausible sentences, this plausibility effect was reliably attenuated when a distractor item partially matched the cues at retrieval. We interpret these results as being compatible with the predictions of cue-based parsing. The illusions of plausibility that we report indicate that similarity-based retrieval interference has a potent influence on the semantic interpretation that is assigned to a sentence during processing.

Not All Phrases Are Equally Attractive: Experimental Evidence for Selective Agreement Attraction Effects.

Research on memory retrieval during sentence comprehension suggests that similarity-based interference is mediated by the grammatical function of the distractor. For instance, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) observed interference during retrieval for subject-verb thematic binding when the distractor occurred as an oblique argument inside a prepositional phrase (PP), but not when it occurred as a core argument in direct object position. This contrast motivated the proposal that constituent encodings vary in the distinctiveness of their memory representations based on an argument hierarchy, which makes them differentially susceptible to interference. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested. The present study uses an interference paradigm involving agreement attraction (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009) to test whether the argument status of the distractor determines susceptibility to interference. Results from two self-paced reading experiments show a clear contrast: agreement attraction is observed for oblique arguments (e.g., PP distractors), but attraction is nullified for core arguments (i.e., direct object and subject distractors). A follow-up experiment showed that this contrast cannot be reduced to the syntactic position of the distractor, favoring an account based on the semantic properties of the distractor. These findings support the proposal that interference is mediated by the argument status of the distractor and extend previous results by showing that the effect generalizes to a broader set of syntactic contexts and a wider range of syntactic dependencies. More generally, these results motivate a more nuanced account of real-time agreement processing that depends on both retrieval and encoding mechanisms.

Morphosyntactic Production and Verbal Working Memory: Evidence From Greek Aphasia and Healthy Aging.

The present work investigated whether verbal working memory (WM) affects morphosyntactic production in configurations that do not involve or favor similarity-based interference and whether WM interacts with verb-related morphosyntactic categories and/or cue-target distance (locality). It also explored whether the findings related to the questions above lend support to a recent account of agrammatic morphosyntactic production: Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012). A sentence completion task testing production of subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, and aspect in local and nonlocal conditions and two verbal WM tasks were administered to 8 Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and 103 healthy participants. The 3 morphosyntactic categories dissociated in both groups (agreement > tense > aspect). A significant interaction emerged in both groups between the 3 morphosyntactic categories and WM. There was no main effect of locality in either of the 2 groups. At the individual level, all 8 PWA exhibited dissociations between agreement, tense, and aspect, and effects of locality were contradictory. Results suggest that individuals with WM limitations (both PWA and healthy older speakers) show dissociations between the production of verb-related morphosyntactic categories. WM affects performance shaping the pattern of morphosyntactic production (in Greek: subject-verb agreement > tense > aspect). The absence of an effect of locality suggests that executive capacities tapped by WM tasks are involved in morphosyntactic processing of demanding categories even when the cue is adjacent to the target. Results are consistent with the Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis et al., 2012). https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6024428.

Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement.

Long-distance verb-argument dependencies generally require the integration of a fronted argument when the verb is encountered for sentence interpretation. Under a parsing model that handles long-distance dependencies through a cue-based retrieval mechanism, retrieval is hampered when retrieval cues also resonate with non-target elements (retrieval interference). However, similarity-based interference may also stem from interference arising during the encoding of elements in memory (encoding interference), an effect that is not directly accountable for by a cue-based retrieval mechanism. Although encoding and retrieval interference are clearly distinct at the theoretical level, it is difficult to disentangle the two on empirical grounds, since encoding interference may also manifest at the retrieval region. We report two self-paced reading experiments aimed at teasing apart the role of each component in gender and number subject-verb agreement in Italian and English object relative clauses. In Italian, the verb does not agree in gender with the subject, thus providing no cue for retrieval. In English, although present tense verbs agree in number with the subject, past tense verbs do not, allowing us to test the role of number as a retrieval cue within the same language. Results from both experiments converge, showing similarity-based interference at encoding, and some evidence for an effect at retrieval. After having pointed out the non-negligible role of encoding in sentence comprehension, and noting that Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) ACT-R model of sentence processing, the most fully developed cue-based retrieval approach to sentence processing does not predict encoding effects, we propose an augmentation of this model that predicts these effects. We then also propose a self-organizing sentence processing model (SOSP), which has the advantage of accounting for retrieval and encoding interference with a single mechanism.

Proform-Antecedent Linking in Individuals with Agrammatic Aphasia: A Test of the Intervener Hypothesis.

To evaluate processing and comprehension of pronouns and reflexives in individuals with agrammatic (Broca's) aphasia and age-matched control participants. Specifically, we evaluate processing and comprehension patterns in terms of a specific hypothesis -- the Intervener Hypothesis - that posits that the difficulty of individuals with agrammatic (Broca's) aphasia results from similarity-based interference caused by the presence of an intervening NP between two elements of a dependency chain. We used an eye tracking-while-listening paradigm to investigate real-time processing (Experiment 1) and a sentence-picture matching task to investigate final interpretive comprehension (Experiment 2) of sentences containing proforms in complement phrase and subject relative constructions. Individuals with agrammatic aphasia demonstrated a greater proportion of gazes to the correct referent of reflexives relative to pronouns and significantly greater comprehension accuracy of reflexives relative to pronouns. These results provide support for the Intervener Hypothesis, previous support for which comes from studies of Wh- questions and unaccusative verbs, and we argue that this account provides an explanation for the deficits of individuals with agrammatic aphasia across a growing set of sentence constructions. The current study extends this hypothesis beyond filler-gap dependencies to referential dependencies and allows us to refine the hypothesis in terms of the structural constraints that meet the description of the Intervener Hypothesis.

Models of retrieval in sentence comprehension: A computational evaluation using Bayesian hierarchical modeling

Abstract Research on similarity-based interference has provided extensive evidence that the formation of dependencies between non-adjacent words relies on a cue-based retrieval mechanism. There are two different models that can account for one of the main predictions of interference, i.e., a slowdown at a retrieval site, when several items share a feature associated with a retrieval cue: Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) activation-based model and McElree’s (2000) direct-access model. Even though these two models have been used almost interchangeably, they are based on different assumptions and predict differences in the relationship between reading times and response accuracy. The activation-based model follows the assumptions of the ACT-R framework, and its retrieval process behaves as a lognormal race between accumulators of evidence with a single variance. Under this model, accuracy of the retrieval is determined by the winner of the race and retrieval time by its rate of accumulation. In contrast, the direct-access model assumes a model of memory where only the probability of retrieval can be affected, while the retrieval time is drawn from the same distribution; in this model, differences in latencies are a by-product of the possibility of backtracking and repairing incorrect retrievals. We implemented both models in a Bayesian hierarchical framework in order to evaluate them and compare them. The data show that correct retrievals take longer than incorrect ones, and this pattern is better fit under the direct-access model than under the activation-based model. This finding does not rule out the possibility that retrieval may be behaving as a race model with assumptions that follow less closely the ones from the ACT-R framework. By introducing a modification of the activation model, i.e., by assuming that the accumulation of evidence for retrieval of incorrect items is not only slower but noisier (i.e., different variances for the correct and incorrect items), the model can provide a fit as good as the one of the direct-access model. This first ever computational evaluation of alternative accounts of retrieval processes in sentence processing opens the way for a broader investigation of theories of dependency completion.

Similarity-Based Interference and the Acquisition of Adjunct Control.

Previous research on the acquisition of adjunct control has observed non-adultlike behavior for sentences like “John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk.” While adults only allow a subject control interpretation for these sentences (that John tripped on the sidewalk), preschool-aged children have been reported to allow a much wider range of interpretations. A number of different tasks have been used with the aim of identifying a grammatical source of children’s errors. In this paper, we consider the role of extragrammatical factors. In two comprehension experiments, we demonstrate that error rates go up when the similarity increases between an antecedent and a linearly intervening noun phrase, first with similarity in gender, and next with similarity in number marking. This suggests that difficulties with adjunct control are to be explained (at least in part) by the sentence processing mechanisms that underlie similarity-based interference in adults.

Cardinal Colour Recognition: Sensitivity to Similarity-based Mask-Induced Interference?

Cardinal Colour Recognition: Sensitivity to Similarity-based Mask-Induced Interference?

Sources of relative clause processing difficulty: Evidence from Russian

This study investigates the sources of processing difficulty in complex sentences involving relative clauses (RCs). Self-paced reading and eye tracking were used to test the comprehension of Russian subject- and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs) that had the same word-order configuration, but different noun phrase (NP) types (full NPs vs. pronouns) in the embedded clause. In both SRCs and ORCs, this NP intervened between the modified noun and the RC verb. A corpus analysis and acceptability rating experiment indicated different frequency/preference profiles for this word order depending on RC type and embedded NP type. In line with these profiles, processing difficulty was revealed early in the embedded clause for less frequent/dispreferred constructions. Later in the embedded clause, the processing of the RC verb was comparable for both SRCs and ORCs when the same number of NP arguments was available for integration. While there were no indications of an ORC penalty at or after this verb, late-stage comprehension difficulty was found for full-NP ORCs, but not for their pronominal counterparts, suggesting that similarity-based interference in combination with ORC structure influences the overall comprehension of these sentences. Taken together, these findings support a hybrid model under which independent sources of processing difficulty affect different stages of RC comprehension.

Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all.

This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand.

Working Memory in the Processing of Long-Distance Dependencies: Interference and Filler Maintenance.

During the temporal delay between the filler and gap sites in long-distance dependencies, the "active filler" strategy can be implemented in two ways: the filler phrase can be actively maintained in working memory ("maintenance account"), or it can be retrieved only when the parser posits a gap ("retrieval account"). The current study tested whether filler content is maintained during the processing of dependencies. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we compared reading times on a noun phrase (NP) between the filler and gap sites in object relative clauses, to reading times on an NP between the antecedent and ellipsis sites in ellipsis sentences. While in the former type of dependency a filler by hypothesis can be maintained, in the latter there is no indication for the existence of a dependency prior to the ellipsis site, and hence no maintenance. By varying the amount of similarity-based interference between the antecedent and integration sites, we tested the influence of holding an unresolved dependency on reading times. Significantly increased reading times due to interference were found only in the object relative condition, and not in the ellipsis condition, demonstrating filler maintenance costs. The fact that these costs were measured as an effect on similarity-based interference indicates that the maintained representation of the filler must include at least some of the features shared by the interfering NP.

Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German

ABSTRACTTwo eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N1= 32,N2= 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.

Similarity-based interference in sentence comprehension: Literature review and Bayesian meta-analysis

We report a comprehensive review of the published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies. We also provide a quantitative random-effects meta-analysis of eyetracking and self-paced reading studies. We show that the empirical evidence is only partly consistent with cue-based retrieval as implemented in the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05) and that there are important differences between the reviewed dependency types. In non-agreement subject-verb dependencies, there is evidence for inhibitory interference in configurations where the correct dependent fully matches the retrieval cues. This is consistent with the LV05 cue-based retrieval account. By contrast, in subject-verb agreement as well as in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent dependencies, no evidence for inhibitory interference is found in configurations with a fully cue-matching subject/antecedent. In configurations with only a partially cue-matching subject or antecedent, the meta-analysis reveals facilitatory interference in subject-verb agreement and inhibitory interference in reflexives/reciprocals. The former is consistent with the LV05 account, but the latter is not. Moreover, the meta-analysis reveals that (i) interference type (proactive versus retroactive) leads to different effects in the reviewed dependency types and (ii) the prominence of the distractor strongly influences the interference effect. In sum, the meta-analysis suggests that the LV05 needs important modifications to account for the unexplained interference patterns and the differences between the dependency types. More generally, the meta-analysis provides a quantitative empirical basis for comparing the predictions of competing accounts of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension.

Auditory N1 reveals planning and monitoring processes during music performance.

The current study investigated the relationship between planning processes and feedback monitoring during music performance, a complex task in which performers prepare upcoming events while monitoring their sensory outcomes. Theories of action planning in auditory-motor production tasks propose that the planning of future events co-occurs with the perception of auditory feedback. This study investigated the neural correlates of planning and feedback monitoring by manipulating the contents of auditory feedback during music performance. Pianists memorized and performed melodies at a cued tempo in a synchronization-continuation task while the EEG was recorded. During performance, auditory feedback associated with single melody tones was occasionally substituted with tones corresponding to future (next), present (current), or past (previous) melody tones. Only future-oriented altered feedback disrupted behavior: Future-oriented feedback caused pianists to slow down on the subsequent tone more than past-oriented feedback, and amplitudes of the auditory N1 potential elicited by the tone immediately following the altered feedback were larger for future-oriented than for past-oriented or noncontextual (unrelated) altered feedback; larger N1 amplitudes were associated with greater slowing following altered feedback in the future condition only. Feedback-related negativities were elicited in all altered feedback conditions. In sum, behavioral and neural evidence suggests that future-oriented feedback disrupts performance more than past-oriented feedback, consistent with planning theories that posit similarity-based interference between feedback and planning contents. Neural sensory processing of auditory feedback, reflected in the N1 ERP, may serve as a marker for temporal disruption caused by altered auditory feedback in auditory-motor production tasks.

A short discourse on reflexives: a reply to Cunnings (2016)

In his article, Parsing and working memory in bilingual sentence processing, Cunnings invites us to consider the hypothesis that important differences in how L1 and L2 populations process sentences stem from differences in how these speakers store and retrieve linguistic encodings in memory during the course of sentence comprehension (Cunnings, 2016). Specifically, he proposes that L2 speakers are more susceptible to similarity-based retrieval interference than their L1 counterparts, and L2 speakers weight discourse cues more heavily than syntactic cues when resolving open linguistic dependencies via memory retrieval. I find these to be interesting hypotheses that merit further investigation, especially in light of the prominence that these issues currently enjoy in L1 processing research. Nonetheless, I sound a note of caution: these claims go quite a bit beyond what is currently known, either theoretically or empirically. This makes support for these claims weak at present, but happily, this state of affairs offers clear directions for future research.