Shravan Vasishth

Locality and interference effects in sentence comprehension

September 24, 2007 - 5:30 PM
Room 116, Natural Science Building

Abstract
The act of comprehending a sentence involves a complex set of rapid cognitive processes that engage multiple memory systems. Minimally, long-term lexical memory must be accessed, novel compositional structures incrementally created and maintained in a working memory, local and global ambiguities resolved at multiple levels of linguistic representation, and an interpretation of the sentence constructed that is integrated into a referential representation of the current discourse.

A key process during all this is the integration of incoming lexical elements with the (partial) syntactic structure built so far. Such integrations are not instantaneous or cost-free, and many different theories have been proposed to explain their psychological properties. A few examples are Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson & Thomas 1977, Gibson 1998, 2000; Grodner & Gibson 2005; Warren & Gibson 2005), Surprisal (Hale 2001, Levy 2007), cue-based parsing (Lewis and Vasishth 2005, Vasishth and Lewis 2006, Vasishth, Bruessow, Lewis & Drenhaus 2008) and the interference theories proposed by Gordon et al. (2001, 2002, 2004, 2007); Lewis and Vasishth (2005); Lewis, Vasishth and Van Dyke (2006); and Van Dyke and McElree (2006). I focus on two signature phenomena that all these theories address: locality and interference.

Using experimental data from eyetracking, self-paced reading, and event-related potentials, I will argue that remarkably good empirical coverage of locality and interference effects is possible by coupling well-accepted assumptions about incremental parsing with fairly general assumptions about constraints on cognition (Anderson et al., 2004).

References
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