A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence…

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of…

We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing developed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05). The predictions of the model are compared with the results of a recent meta-analysis of published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies…

Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb,…

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego-moving or object-moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley-moving clips showed…

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs--more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any…

We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes…

The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these…