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Abstract Recent studies have revealed great individual variability in cue weighting, and such variation is shown to be systematic across individuals and linked to differences in some general cognitive mechanism. The present study investigated the role of subcortical encoding as a source of individual variability in cue weighting by focusing on English listeners’ frequency following responses to the tense/lax English vowel contrast varying in spectral and durational cues. Listeners differed in early auditory encoding with some encoding the spectral cue more veridically than the durational one, while others exhibited the reverse pattern. These differences in cue encoding further correlate with behavioral variability in cue weighting, suggesting that specificity in cue encoding across individuals modulates how cues are weighted in downstream processes. 

Previous studies have shown that representationally complex referents are encoded slower into working memory (WM) but are retrieved faster (Hofmeister, 2011; Karimi & Ferreira, 2016). However, the cost of maintaining complex representations is still not well understood. Through two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the cost of encoding, maintaining and retrieving complex representations in WM. While we replicated the facilitatory effect during retrieval, the slowdown during encoding was not consistent across our experiments. More critically, for the first time, our experiments demonstrated that maintaining complex representations in WM is less costly than maintaining their simple counterparts. Furthermore, we found that WM maintenance cost is reduced because complex target noun phrases are more distinct from other competing referents in WM than simple ones. Overall, our results showed that the semantic elaboration of complex representations can reduce maintenance cost and provided new perspectives into this understudied WM process. 

Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listeners’ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material to be deaccented. We argue that these results are more compatible with the accommodation model of deaccenting licensing, which allows for differential licensing of deaccentuation on inferable versus repeated constituents and provides a principled account of the sensitivity of accentuation preferences on inferable material to broader contextual manipulations.