@article{BartekLewisVasishthetal.2011, author = {Bartek, Brian and Lewis, Richard L. and Vasishth, Shravan and Smith, Mason R.}, title = {In Search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension}, series = {Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition}, volume = {37}, journal = {Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition}, number = {5}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0278-7393}, doi = {10.1037/a0024194}, pages = {1178 -- 1198}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject-verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Gendt2011, author = {Gendt, Anja}, title = {Eye movements under the control of working memory : the challenge of a reading-span task}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-69224}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2011}, abstract = {During reading oculomotor processes guide the eyes over the text. The visual information recorded is accessed, evaluated and processed. Only by retrieving the meaning of a word from the long-term memory, as well as through the connection and storage of the information about each individual word, is it possible to access the semantic meaning of a sentence. Therefore memory, and here in particular working memory, plays a pivotal role in the basic processes of reading. The following dissertation investigates to what extent different demands on memory and memory capacity have an effect on eye movement behavior while reading. The frequently used paradigm of the reading span task, in which test subjects read and evaluate individual sentences, was used for the experimental review of the research questions. The results speak for the fact that working memory processes have a direct effect on various eye movement measurements. Thus a high working memory load, for example, reduced the perceptual span while reading. The lower the individual working memory capacity of the reader was, the stronger was the influence of the working memory load on the processing of the sentence.}, language = {en} }