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Abstract Linguistic experience plays a clear role in accounting for variability in sentence comprehension behavior across individuals and across sentence types. We aimed to understand how individual differences in reading experience predict reading behavior. Corpus analyses revealed the frequencies with which our experimental items appeared in written and spoken language. We hypothesized that reading experience should affect sentence comprehension most substantially for sentence types that individuals primarily encounter through written language. Readers with more text exposure were faster and more accurate readers overall, but they read sentence types biased to written language particularly faster than did readers with less text exposure. We see clear effects of text exposure on sentence comprehension in ways that allow explicit links between written and spoken corpus statistics and behavior. We discuss theoretical implications of effects of text exposure for experience-based approaches to sentence processing.
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A Working Memory Model of Sentence Processing as Binding Morphemes to Syntactic Positions
Abstract As they process complex linguistic input, language comprehenders must maintain a mapping between lexical items (e.g., morphemes) and their syntactic position in the sentence. We propose a model of how these morpheme‐position bindings are encoded, maintained, and reaccessed in working memory, based on working memory models such as “serial‐order‐in‐a‐box” and its SOB‐Complex Span version. Like those models, our model of linguistic working memory derives a range of attested memory interference effects from the process of binding items to positions in working memory. We present simulation results capturing similarity‐based interference as well as item distortion effects. Our model provides a unified account of these two major classes of interference effects in sentence processing, attributing both types of effects to an associative memory architecture underpinning linguistic computation.
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- PAR ID:
- 10568092
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Topics in Cognitive Science
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1756-8757
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 88-105
- Size(s):
- p. 88-105
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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