The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI

Retrieval cues and syntactic ambiguity resolution:Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence

Language comprehension involves coping with ambiguity and recovering from misanalysis. Syntactic ambiguity resolution is associated with increased reading times, a classic finding that has shaped theories of sentence processing. However, reaction times conflate the time it takes a process to complete with the quality of the behavior-related information available to the system. We therefore used the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure (SAT) to derive orthogonal estimates of processing time and interpretation accuracy, and tested whether stronger retrieval cues (via semantic relatedness: neighed->horse vs. fell->horse) aid interpretation during recovery. On average, ambiguous sentences took 250ms longer (SAT rate) to interpret than unambiguous controls, demonstrating veridical differences in processing time. Retrieval cues more strongly related to the true subject always increased accuracy, regardless of ambiguity. These findings are consistent with a language processing architecture where cue-driven operations give rise to interpretation, and wherein diagnostic cues aid retrieval, regardless of parsing difficulty or structural uncertainty

Literal and Figurative Interpretations Are Computed in Equal Time

this article should be addressed to B. McElree, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003 (e-mail: bdm@psych. nyu.edu

Sentence Comprehension Is Mediated by Content-Addressable Memory Structures

formation. Such a system 111 0090-6905/00/0300-0111$18.00/0 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2000 This research was supported by NIMH Grant MH57458. The author thanks Lisbeth Dyer and Stephani Foraker for assistance with the generation of materials and data collection. Program in Cognition and Perception, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, 10003-6634. Email: [email protected]. contrasts with traditional views of WM and with recent findings that access to some forms of information in WM requires a search process. ACCESSING WM STRUCTURES The behavioral marker of a search process is that the time to access a representation depends on the amount of information held in memory or the amount of information interpolated between initial processing and retrieval. Myriad studies demonstrate that the probability of maintaining a representation in WM decreases as a function of both factors. Ho

Memory for linguistic features and the focus of attention: evidence from the dynamics of agreement inside DP

The amount of information that can be concurrently maintained in the focus of attention is strongly restricted (Broadbent, 1958). The goal of this study was to test whether this restriction was functionally significant for language comprehension. We examined the time course dynamics of processing determiner-head agreement in English demonstrative phrases. We found evidence that agreement processing was slowed when determiner and head were no longer adjacent, but separated by modifiers. We argue that some information is shunted nearly immediately from the focus of attention, necessitating its later retrieval. Plural, the marked feature value for number, exhibits better preservation in the focus of attention, however, than the unmarked value, singular

Relationship between measures of working memory capacity and the time course of short-term memory retrieval and interference resolution.

The response-signal speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure was used to investigate the relationship between measures of working memory capacity and the time course of short-term item recognition. High-and low-span participants studied sequentially presented 6-item lists, immediately followed by a recognition probe. Analyses of composite list and serial position SAT functions found no differences in retrieval speed between the 2 span groups. Overall accuracy was higher for high spans than low spans, with more pronounced differences for earlier serial positions. Analysis of false alarms to recent negatives (lures from the previous study list) revealed no differences in the timing or magnitude of early false alarms, thought to reflect familiarity-based judgments. However, analyses of false alarms later in retrieval indicated that recollective information accrues more slowly for low spans, which suggests that recollec-tive information may also contribute less to judgments concerning studied items for low-span partici-pants. These findings can provide an explanation for the greater susceptibility of low spans to interfer-ence