Representational Complexity and Memory Retrieval in Language Comprehension.
نویسنده
چکیده
Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by a target's representational complexity in terms of syntactic and semantic features. Three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that reading times at retrieval sites (but not earlier) decrease when more complex phrases occur as filler-phrases in filler-gap dependencies. The data also show that complexity-based effects are not dependent on string length, syntactic differences, or the amount of processing the stimuli elicit. Activation boosting and reduced similarity-based interference are implicated as likely sources of these complexity-based effects.
منابع مشابه
Representational Complexity and Memory Retrieval in Language Comprehension a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
How an object or event is described depends upon numerous factors that have been identified by prior research in linguistics, pragmatics, and psychology. What this prior research has not established, however, is what consequences the resulting choice of linguistic form has on subsequent comprehension processes. This dissertation begins with the assertion that the quantity of information encoded...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Language and cognitive processes
دوره 26 3 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011