TY - JOUR A1 - Schoknecht, Pia A1 - Roehm, Dietmar A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias A1 - Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina T1 - The interaction of predictive processing and similarity-based retrieval interference BT - an ERP study JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - Language processing requires memory retrieval to integrate current input with previous context and making predictions about upcoming input. We propose that prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin, i.e. functionally the same, as they both activate memory representations. Under this assumption, memory retrieval and prediction should interact: Retrieval interference can only occur at a word that triggers retrieval and a fully predicted word would not do that. The present study investigated the proposed interaction with event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of sentence pairs in German. Predictability was measured via cloze probability. Memory retrieval was manipulated via the position of a distractor inducing proactive or retroactive similarity-based interference. Linear mixed model analyses provided evidence for the hypothesised interaction in a broadly distributed negativity, which we discuss in relation to the interference ERP literature. Our finding supports the proposal that memory retrieval and prediction are functionally the same. KW - Language KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - prediction KW - predictive KW - processing KW - interaction KW - ERP Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2026421 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 37 IS - 7 SP - 883 EP - 901 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Puebla Antunes, Cecilia A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Discourse Prominence and Antecedent MisRetrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution JF - Discours : revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique N2 - Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent’s discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent’s discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing. KW - pronoun resolution KW - non-native sentence processing KW - discourse KW - prominence KW - interference KW - German KW - eye-movement monitoring Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4000/discours.11720 SN - 1963-1723 IS - 29 PB - Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Maion Recherche CY - Paris ER - TY - GEN A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Phillips, Colin A1 - Wagers, Matthew T1 - Editorial: Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Representations in Memory T2 - Frontiers in psychology KW - sentence comprehension KW - encoding KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - anaphor resolution KW - agreement processing KW - filler-gap dependencies Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00164 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 8 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Lewis, Richard L. T1 - Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues. KW - sentence processing KW - anaphor resolution KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - computational modeling KW - eye tracking Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00329 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 7 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - GEN A1 - Liesenjohann, Thilo A1 - Liesenjohann, Monique A1 - Trebaticka, Lenka A1 - Sundell, Janne A1 - Haapakoski, Marko A1 - Ylönen, Hannu A1 - Eccard, Jana T1 - State-dependent foraging BT - lactating voles adjust their foraging behavior according to the presence of a potential nest predator and season T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Parental care often produces a trade-off between meeting nutritional demands of offspring and the duties of offspring protection, especially in altricial species. Parents have to leave their young unattended for foraging trips, during which nestlings are exposed to predators. We investigated how rodent mothers of altricial young respond to risk of nest predation in their foraging decisions. We studied foraging behavior of lactating bank voles (Myodes glareolus) exposed to a nest predator, the common shrew (Sorex araneus). We conducted the experiment in summer (high resource provisioning for both species) and autumn (less food available) in 12 replicates with fully crossed factors “shrew presence” and “season.” We monitored use of feeding stations near and far from the nest as measurement of foraging activity and strategic foraging behavior. Vole mothers adapted their strategies to shrew presence and optimized their foraging behavior according to seasonal constraints, resulting in an interaction of treatment and season. In summer, shrew presence reduced food intake from feeding stations, while it enhanced intake in autumn. Shrew presence decreased the number of visited feeding stations in autumn and concentrated mother’s foraging efforts to fewer stations. Independent of shrew presence or season, mothers foraged more in patches further away from the nest than near the nest. Results indicate that females are not investing in nest guarding but try to avoid the accumulation of olfactory cues near the nest leading a predator to the young. Additionally, our study shows how foraging strategies and nest attendance are influenced by seasonal food provision. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 857 KW - Myodes glareolus KW - optimal foraging KW - Sorex araneus KW - nest protection KW - seasonality KW - interference Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-432878 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 857 SP - 747 EP - 754 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Lewis, Richard L. T1 - Retrieval interference in syntactic processing BT - the case of reflexive binding in english T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue -based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 493 KW - sentence processing KW - anaphor resolution KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - computational modeling KW - eye tracking Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-407987 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 493 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Festman, Julia T1 - Language control abilities of late bilinguals T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI: one group consistently produced significantly more errors of CLI on both tasks than the other (thereby replicating our findings from a bilingual picture naming task). This striking group difference in language control ability can only be explained by differences in cognitive control, not in language proficiency or language mode. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 459 KW - language control KW - language proficiency KW - interference KW - error analysis KW - language mode KW - switching attitude Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-413930 IS - 459 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Engelmann, Felix A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Retrieval interference in reflexive processing: experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. KW - Chinese reflexives KW - ACT-R KW - eye-tracking KW - interference KW - cue-based retrieval KW - computational modeling KW - ziji KW - content-addressable memory Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00617 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Benz, Lena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Dillon, Brian W. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. KW - anaphors KW - reflexives KW - possessives KW - eye-tracking KW - German KW - Swedish KW - working-memory KW - interference Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00506 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Bader, Markus T1 - An interference account of the missing-VP effect JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. KW - sentence parsing KW - center embedding KW - grammatical illusion KW - missing-VP effect KW - cue-based retrieval KW - interference KW - German Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00766 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Festman, Julia T1 - Language control abilities of late bilinguals JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition. N2 - Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI: one group consistently produced significantly more errors of CLI on both tasks than the other (thereby replicating our findings from a bilingual picture naming task). This striking group difference in language control ability can only be explained by differences in cognitive control, not in language proficiency or language mode. KW - language control KW - language proficiency KW - interference KW - error analysis KW - language mode KW - switching attitude Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728911000344 SN - 1366-7289 VL - 15 IS - 3 SP - 580 EP - 593 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Oberauer, Klaus A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - A formal model of capacity limits in working memory JF - Journal of Memory and Language N2 - A mathematical model of working-memory capacity limits is proposed on the key assumption of mutual interference between items in working memory. Interference is assumed to arise from overwriting of features shared by these items. The model was fit to time-accuracy data of memory-updating tasks from four experiments using nonlinear mixed effect (NLME) models as a framework. The model gave a good account of the data from a numerical and a spatial task version. The performance pattern in a combination of numerical and spatial updating could be explained by variations in the interference parameter: assuming less feature overlap between contents from different domains than between contents from the same domain, the model can account for double dissociations of content domains in dual-task experiments. Experiment 3 extended this idea to similarity within the verbal domain. The decline of memory accuracy with increasing memory load was steeper with phonologically similar than with dissimilar material, although processing speed was faster for the similar material. The model captured the similarity effects with a higher estimated interference parameter for the similar than for the dissimilar condition. The results are difficult to explain with alternative models, in particular models incorporating time-based decay and models assuming limited resource pools. KW - working memory KW - interference KW - capacity KW - mathematical model KW - non-linear mixed effects Y1 - 2006 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0749596X U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.009 SN - 0749-596X VL - 55 IS - 4 SP - 601 EP - 626 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Bader, Markus T1 - An interference account of the missing-VP effect N2 - Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 278 KW - sentence parsing KW - center embedding KW - grammatical illusion KW - missing-VP effect KW - cue-based retrieval KW - interference KW - German Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-78673 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Engelmann, Felix A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Retrieval interference in reflexive processing BT - Experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling N2 - We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 276 KW - Chinese reflexives KW - ACT-R KW - eye-tracking KW - interference KW - cue-based retrieval KW - computational modeling KW - ziji KW - content-addressable memory Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-78738 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Benz, Lena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Dillon, Brian W. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Teasing apart Retrieval and Encoding Interference in the Processing of Anaphors N2 - Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 275 KW - anaphors KW - reflexives KW - possessives KW - eye-tracking KW - German KW - Swedish KW - working-memory KW - interference Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-78714 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Bader, Markus T1 - An interference account of the missing-VP effect JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. KW - sentence parsing KW - center embedding KW - grammatical illusion KW - missing-VP effect KW - cue-based retrieval KW - interference KW - German Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00766 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 766 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Engelmann, Felix A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Retrieval interference in reflexive processing BT - Experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. KW - Chinese reflexives KW - ACT-R KW - eye-tracking KW - interference KW - cue-based retrieval KW - computational modeling KW - ziji KW - content-addressable memory Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00617 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 617 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Benz, Lena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Dillon, Brian W. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. KW - anaphors KW - reflexives KW - possessives KW - eye-tracking KW - German KW - Swedish KW - working-memory KW - interference Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00506 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 506 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gianelli, Claudia A1 - Dalla Volta, Riccardo T1 - Does listening to action-related sentences modulate the activity of the motor system? BT - Replication of a combined TMS and behavioral study JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - The neurophysiological and behavioral correlates of action-related language processing have been debated for long time. A precursor in this field was the study by Buccino et al. (2005) combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and behavioral measures (reaction times, RTs) to study the effect of listening to hand- and foot-related sentences. In the TMS experiment, the authors showed a decrease of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from hand muscles when processing hand-related verbs as compared to foot-related verbs. Similarly, MEPs recorded from leg muscles decreased when participants processed foot-related as compared to hand-related verbs. In the behavioral experiment, using the same stimuli and a semantic decision task the authors found slower RTs when the participants used the body effector (hand or foot) involved in the actual execution of the action expressed by the presented verb to give their motor responses. These findings were interpreted as an interference effect due to a simultaneous involvement of the motor system in both a language and a motor task. Our replication aimed to enlarge the sample size and replicate the findings with higher statistical power. The TMS experiment showed a significant modulation of hand MEPs, but in the sense of a motor facilitation when processing hand-related verbs. On the contrary, the behavioral experiment did not show significant results. The results are discussed within the general debate on the time-course of the modulation of motor cortex during implicit and explicit language processing and in relation to the studies on action observation/understanding. KW - action language KW - motor system KW - TMS KW - motor resonance KW - interference KW - replication Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01511 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 5 SP - 8 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gianelli, Claudia A1 - Dalla Volta, Riccardo T1 - Does listening to action-related sentences modulate the activity of the motor system? BT - Replication of a combined TMS and behavioral study N2 - The neurophysiological and behavioral correlates of action-related language processing have been debated for long time. A precursor in this field was the study by Buccino et al. (2005) combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and behavioral measures (reaction times, RTs) to study the effect of listening to hand- and foot-related sentences. In the TMS experiment, the authors showed a decrease of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from hand muscles when processing hand-related verbs as compared to foot-related verbs. Similarly, MEPs recorded from leg muscles decreased when participants processed foot-related as compared to hand-related verbs. In the behavioral experiment, using the same stimuli and a semantic decision task the authors found slower RTs when the participants used the body effector (hand or foot) involved in the actual execution of the action expressed by the presented verb to give their motor responses. These findings were interpreted as an interference effect due to a simultaneous involvement of the motor system in both a language and a motor task. Our replication aimed to enlarge the sample size and replicate the findings with higher statistical power. The TMS experiment showed a significant modulation of hand MEPs, but in the sense of a motor facilitation when processing hand-related verbs. On the contrary, the behavioral experiment did not show significant results. The results are discussed within the general debate on the time-course of the modulation of motor cortex during implicit and explicit language processing and in relation to the studies on action observation/understanding. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 272 KW - action language KW - motor system KW - TMS KW - motor resonance KW - interference KW - replication Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-75173 ER - TY - THES A1 - Pál, Andrea T1 - The role of cross-linguistic formal similarity in Hungarian-German bilingual learners of English as a foreign language N2 - Gegenstand der Dissertation ist die Untersuchung interlingualer lexikalischer Prozesse von Worterkennung und-zugriff bei ungarndeutschen Bilingualen, die Englisch als Fremdsprache erlernen, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle von Kognaten. Ziel der Studie ist es, die Prozesse lexikalischer Aktivierung in einem polyglotten System zu beschreiben und sowohl die mentalen Lexika, als auch die Verknüpfung und gegenseitige Aktivierung (z. B. durch 'direct word association' oder durch 'concept mediation') zu modellieren. Drei abhängige Variablen werden in einer quantitativen und qualitativen Analyse empirischer Daten untersucht: Genauigkeit, Antwortzeitlatenzen und phonologische Interferenz. Die Resultate der Experimente werden im Rahmen eines multilingualen Netzwerkmodells interpretiert. N2 - The dissertation examines aspects of the interlingual lexical processes of word recognition and word retrieval in Hungarian-German bilinguals learning English as a foreign language, with particular respect to the role of cognates. The purpose of the study is to describe the process of lexical activaton in a polyglot system and to model the mental lexicons and the ways entries in the lexicons are connected and activated (e.g. activation through direct word association or through concept mediation). Three dependent variables are studied in quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data taken from experiments: rate of accurate responses, response latencies and phonological interference. The results of the experiments are interpreted in the framework of a multiple language network model. KW - Hungarian-German bilinguals KW - cognates KW - interference KW - language transfer KW - foreign language acquisition Y1 - 2001 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-0000189 ER -